Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics and Politics (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Leigh Hunt

The life of the poet, critic and journalist Leigh Hunt spanned the Romantic and Victorian eras. His influence in both periods was farreaching—Hunt encouraged poets such as Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and D.G.Rossetti; his reviews of the London stage opened the way for the theatrical criticism of Coleridge, Hazlitt and Lamb; his editorship of the Examiner (1808–22) was a high point in English journalism; his campaigning on liberal issues (which brought him a prison sentence) marks him out as one of the great reformers of the age. His poetry initiated a playful counter-Romanticism; his Autobiography (1850) is the first modern example of the genre. This timely collection of essays by scholars and critics of international standing explores Hunt’s controversial life, writings and politics over the full length of his career, enabling readers to appreciate the brilliance and variety of his achievements. Contents include: • • • • •

Leigh Hunt’s Foliage: a Cockney manifesto Suburb sinners: sex and disease in the Cockney School Cockney chivalry: Hunt, Keats and the aesthetics of excess Leigh Hunt and Romantic spontaneity Interviews and recollections, 1832–1921

William Hazlitt said that Leigh Hunt ‘improves upon acquaintance’. This book introduces Hunt to new generations of readers and argues for the recognition of Hunt’s vital significance to British intellectual and literary culture in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Nicholas Roe is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

His books include John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1997) and, as editor, Keats and History (1995) and Samuel Tailor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (2001).

Routledge studies in romanticism

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Keats’s Boyish Imagination Richard Margraf Turley

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Leigh Hunt Life, poetics, politics Edited by Nicholas Roe

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Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene Michael Eberle-Sinatra

Leigh Hunt Life, poetics, politics

Edited by Nicholas Roe

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2003 Editorial matter and selection Nicholas Roe; individual chapters, the authors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Leigh Hunt: life, poetics, politics/edited by Nicholas Roe. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Hunt, Leigh, 1784–1859. 2. Hunt, Leigh, 1784–1859 —Political and social views. 3. Liberalism—Great Britain— History—19th century. 4. Great Britain—Intellectual life— 19th century. 5. Authors, English—19th century—Biography. 6. Journalists—Great Britain—Biography. 7. Critics—Great Britain—Biography. I. Roe, Nicholas. PR4813.L45 2003 828′.709–dc21 [B] ISBN 0-203-40705-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-34086-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-30984-0 (Print Edition)

2002023994

L. H. was our spiritual grandfather, a free man. Virginia Woolf Dislike mountains, can’t bear height Leigh Hunt

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors Preface and acknowledgements Abbreviations and a note on texts 1

Introduction: Leigh Hunt’s track of radiance

ix x xii xiii 1

NICHOLAS ROE

2

Leigh Hunt: some early matters

19

NICHOLAS ROE

3

Leigh Hunt and Charles Cowden Clarke, 1812–18

32

JOHN BARNARD

4

Leigh Hunt’s Foliage: a Cockney manifesto JEFFREY N.COX

58

5

Suburb sinners: sex and disease in the Cockney School

78

ELIZABETH JONES

6

Leigh Hunt’s aesthetics of intimacy

95

JANE STABLER

7

Cockney chivalry: Hunt, Keats and the aesthetics of excess

118

GREG KUCICH

8

9

‘Even now while I write’: Leigh Hunt and Romantic spontaneity MICHAEL O’NEILL Leigh Hunt and the poetics and politics of the Fancy JEFFREY C.ROBINSON

135

156

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Contents

10 Conceiving disgust: Leigh Hunt, William Gifford and the Quarterly Review

180

KIM WHEATLEY

11 ‘Seeing with final eyes’: Leigh Hunt, design, immortality

198

RODNEY STENNING EDGECOMBE

12 Leigh Hunt: interviews and recollections, 1832–1921

214

NICHOLAS ROE

Index

233

Illustrations

Frontispiece: Leigh Hunt by John Jackson 1

2

George Cruikshank, ‘A free born Englishman! The pride of the world!’

xvi

4

Letter from Leigh Hunt to Charles Cowden Clarke, dated ‘Surrey Jail—Jan. 5 1814’

37

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Sociable sonnets

61

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The suburban gardenesque

89

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Leigh Hunt’s ‘Wishing-cap persona’

101

6

An oval kiss

111

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‘Cockney chivalry’

126

8

Mary Robinson

182

Contributors

John Barnard has edited Keats’s poems, works by Etherege and Congreve, and has been General Editor of Longman Annotated Poets since 1975. He has published extensively on the second generation Romantics, seventeenthcentury literature and book history. Until his retirement in 2001 he was Professor of English Literature and Director of the Institute of Bibliography and Textual Criticism in the School of English, University of Leeds. Jeffrey N.Cox is Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is also Director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts. His books include Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (1998) and In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France (1987). He edited Seven Gothic Dramas 1789–1825 (1992), a volume of plays about slavery in Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (1999), and is co-editor, with Greg Kucich, of two volumes of Hunt’s essays in The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt. Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, Associate Professor of English at the University of Cape Town, took his MA with distinction at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of Leigh Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy (1994), of books on George Herbert, George Crabbe and Thomas Gray (among others), and of numerous articles on balletic, literary and musicological topics. Elizabeth Jones has written about poetic suburbanism and cultural commodification in the poetry of Hunt and Keats, in essays published in the Keats-Shelley Journal, Studies in Romanticism and The Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Toronto. Greg Kucich is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (1991), and is co-editor, with Jeffrey Cox, of two volumes of Hunt’s essays in The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt. He is co-editor of Nineteenth-Century Contexts:

Contributors

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An Interdisciplinary Journal, and is currently writing a book on women’s historical writings of the Romantic era. Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at the University of Durham. His books include The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (1989) and Romanticism and the Self-conscious Poem (1997). With Zachary Leader, he is currently completing an edition of Shelley for the Oxford Authors series. Jeffrey C.Robinson’s books include: Radical Literary Education: A Classroom Experiment with Wordsworth’s Ode (1987), The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image (1989), The Current of Romantic Passion (1991), Romantic Presences: Living Images from the Age of Wordsworth and Shelley (1995) and Reception and Poetics in Keats: My Ended Poet (1998). He has published poetry based on the poetic idiom of Romanticism, including: Spliced Romanticism (1997) and The Life of Things: Utter Wordsworth (2001). He teaches literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Nicholas Roe is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His books include John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1997) and, as editor, Keats and History (1995) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (2001). Jane Stabler is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee. Her books include Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790–1830 (2001) and Byron, Poetics and History (2002). Kim Wheatley is Associate Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, Virginia. She is the author of Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics (1999). Her published essays include ‘The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, XLVII, 1 (1992) and ‘“Attracted by the Body”: Accounts of Shelley’s Cremation’, Keats-Shelley Journal (2000).

Preface and acknowledgements

Leigh Hunt, poet, critic and journalist, outlived his illustrious friend Lord Byron by so many decades that his long life (1784–1859) spanned the Romantic and Victorian eras. His influence in both periods was far-reaching. He encouraged poets like Keats and Shelley, Tennyson and D.G.Rossetti. His reviews of the London stage opened the way for theatrical criticism by Coleridge, Hazlitt and Lamb; his enthusiasm for Italian arts had a comparably fertile effect on the Pre-Raphaelites. Hunt’s editorship of the Examiner (1808– 22) is a high point in English journalism, and his campaigning on liberal issues—which brought him a prison sentence—marks him out as one of the great reformers. His poetry is playful, sparkling, controversial, while his Autobiography (1850) is the first modern example of the genre. Poets have learned much from him. John Keats found his voice by following Hunt’s example. Elizabeth Barrett remarked admiringly that Hunt’s poetry makes us ‘feel & see’; Robert Browning emulated his informal brio. Virginia Woolf identified Hunt as ‘spiritual grandfather’ of the modern world. John Betjeman and Philip Larkin adapted the domestic, suburban milieu and language of his poems. The chapters in this book explore Hunt’s extraordinary multi-faceted career, investigating his poetry, politics and life. A variety of approaches is represented, including close reading, historical contextualisation and biographical research. William Hazlitt said in The Spirit of the Age (1825) that Leigh Hunt ‘improves upon acquaintance’; Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics restores Hunt to rightful prominence. I thank the contributors; David Fairer, Jane Stabler and Jim Stewert; Robert A.McCown and Sid Huttner, Keeper of Special Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa; and Joe Whiting and Amrit Bangard at Routledge for commissioning this book and seeing it through the press. Nicholas Roe

Abbreviations

Autobiography

The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (3 vols, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1850). Autobiography, Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography: The Earliest Sketches, ed. Earliest Sketches Stephen F.Fogle, University of Florida Monographs: Humanities,2 (Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 1959). BLJ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A.Marchand (13 vols, London: John Murray, 1973–94). Blunden Edmund Blunden, Leigh Hunt. A Biography (London: Cobden and Sanderson, 1930). BM Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. BPW George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J.McGann (7 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93). CC The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Routledge, 1969–2002). CL The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L.Griggs (6 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71). CLH The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, Edited by his Eldest Son (2 vols, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1862). Cox Jeffrey N.Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). CPW The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.H.Coleridge (2 vols, London, 1912). Critical Essays Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres (London: John Hunt, 1807). E Examiner. Edgecombe Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, Leigh Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994).

xiv

Feast

Abbreviations

Leigh Hunt, The Feast of the Poets (London: James Cawthorn, 1814). Feast (1815) Leigh Hunt, The Feast of the Poets (2nd edn, London: Gale & Fenner, 1815). Foliage Leigh Hunt, Foliage; or, Poems Original and Translated (London: C.& J.Ollier, 1818). Gates Leigh Hunt: A Life in Letters. Together with some Correspondence of William Hazlitt, ed. Eleanor M.Gates (Essex, Conn.: Falls River Publications, 1998). Howe The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P.Howe (21 vols, London and Toronto: J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd 1930–4). Indicator Leigh Hunt, The Indicator (London: Joseph Appleyard, 1820). JKCD Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Juvenilia Leigh Hunt, Juvenilia; or, a Collection of Poems (3rd edn London: J.Whiting 1801). KC The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816–1878 and More Letters and Papers 1814–1879, ed. Hyder E.Rollins (2nd edn, 2 vols, Cambridge, Mass., 1965). K&H Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Kucich Gregory P.Kucich,’ “The Wit in the Dungeon”: Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries’, Romanticism on the Net, 14 (May 1999). LJK The Letters of John Keats, 1814–21, ed. Hyder E.Rollins (2 vols, Cambridge, Mass., 1958). K-SJ Keats-Shelley Journal. K-SMB Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin. K-SR Keats-Shelley Review. Landré Louis Landré, Leigh Hunt (1784–1859). Contribution à I’histoire du Romantisme Anglais (2 vols, Paris: Société D’Edition ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1936). MWB Leigh Hunt, Men, Women, and Books; A Selection of Sketches, Essays and Critical Memoirs, from his Uncollected Prose Writings (2 vols, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1847). OED Oxford English Dictionary. PJK Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). PWLH The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H.S.Milford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923). PWLH (1832) The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt (London: Edward Moxon, 1832). Rimini Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimini: A Poem (London: John Murray, 1816).

Abbreviations

RR

SiR SL SPP WPBS WPW

xv

The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, ed. Donald H.Reiman (9 vols, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1972). Studies in Romanticism. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F.L.Jones (2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poetry and Prose, ed. D.H.Reiman and S.B.Powers (New York: Norton, 1977). The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. R.Ingpen and W.E.Peck (10 vols, London, 1926–30; 1965). William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill, Oxford Authors Series (Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 1984).

NOTE ON TEXTS

Unless noted otherwise, quotations from Hunt’s poetry will be from PWLH. Quotations from Shakespeare will be from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. P.Alexander (1951; London and Glasgow: Collins, 1975).

‘Leigh Hunt. Editor of the Examiner’. This portrait by John Jackson shows Hunt aged 25; it illustrated the autobiographical ‘Memoir of Mr. James Henry Leigh Hunt’ in the Monthly Mirror (April 1810). From the copy of the Monthly Mirror in the Brewer-Leigh Hunt Collection, the University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

1

Introduction Leigh Hunt’s track of radiance Nicholas Roe

When asked ‘which poets influenced [him] most as a young man’, the Poet Laureate John Betjeman replied: ‘William Blake first. Nursery rhymes, then William Blake, then Keats, Leigh Hunt, and most of all Tennyson’.1 The hesitation, ‘William Blake first. Nursery rhymes, then William Blake’, tracks back to formative encounters with lyric and suggests how children’s songs led on to Songs of Innocence and Experience. Scenes from Betjeman’s childhood around Hampstead Heath and Highgate summoned local presences: ‘Then Millfield Lane looked like a Constable/And all the grassy hillocks spoke of Keats’.2 Tennyson was the voice of another English landscape, ‘poet of Lincs’, inspiring ‘master technician’ of verse.3 And Betjeman’s other early influence, Leigh Hunt? When compared with Blake, who in 2001 was the subject of an awe-inspiring exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Hunt has almost disappeared. Yet in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when both were active in London, Hunt was the more visible of the two. As editor of the Examiner newspaper he led the campaign for parliamentary reform and civil rights for Irish Catholics. He was the author of The Story of Rimini, a poem combining lyrical genius, narrative flair and a liberal morality. As a critic Hunt helped launch the careers of Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and D.G.Rossetti. Following the devastating reviews of Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), Hunt broke with the prevailing view of Wordsworth to become one of his most discerning critics—setting out arguments about Wordsworth’s poetry subsequently taken up by betterknown commentators like Coleridge and Hazlitt. Unlike those contemporaries, Hunt had also written perceptively about many women poets of the early nineteenth century. Wherever one looks in the nineteenthcentury literary scene in England, Leigh Hunt’s influence is apparent. Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics is the first full-length collection of scholarly and critical essays devoted to him. Shortly after Hunt left Christ’s Hospital, November 1799, publication of his poems in Juvenilia (1801) brought him a kind of fame; as Hunt later said, the book ‘was unfortunately successful everywhere’ (Autobiography, I: p. 193). He was ‘shown about at parties’ and fêted as a prodigy, although Hunt

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later dismissed these poems as a ‘trash’ of imitations from Collins, Gray, Pope, Akenside, Thomson and Spenser (Autobiography, I: p. 186). He was scathing about his first, youthful collection: when compared with Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s ‘new’ poetry of mind and nature, his own attempts appeared derivative and lacking in ‘real spirit’ (see Foliage, pp. 10– 11). Yet what impresses about the book now is the success with which—as a 16-year-old—he had imitated and adapted his favourite poets, including Coleridge’s recently published ‘Frost at Midnight’. Hunt’s disdain for Juvenilia probably had more to do with the extraordinary list of over 800 subscribers. Publishers and politicians, clergymen and lawyers, painters, poets, bankers and diplomats were listed over fifteen pages at the front of the volume, giving it a ‘glittering illusion of fame and substance’.4 The impression was that Hunt had launched a successful literary career although, as he came to see, the book actually represented a tentative first step. More damagingly, the subscription list (updated and expanded in each edition) signalled the dependence upon patronage that had blighted earlier generations of the Hunt family.5 From now on Hunt determined not to be burdened with obligations, a decision which influenced his independent stance as a theatre reviewer for his brother John’s paper the News (1805–8) and as the editor of the Examiner (1808–22). In his theatre reviews for the News Hunt abandoned the convention of ‘puffing’ productions and offered, instead, a combative critical engagement with the plays and performers. What he found on the London stage were ‘wretched dramas which are called new without the least pretension of originality’, and actors whose ‘histrionic genius’ exaggerated the ‘surfaces and externals’ of character (Critical Essays, pp. x, xi, xiii).The leading actor John Philip Kemble succeeded best in roles like Macbeth, which suited his imperious stage presence. But Kemble’s ‘studious and important preciseness’ could seem calculated: ‘he never pulls out his handkerchief, Hunt noticed, ‘without a design on the audience’ (Critical Essays, pp. 8, 10). Kemble mimicked ‘external habits’ rather than inner ‘mental character’; by contrast Hunt found Kemble’s sister, Sarah Siddons, ‘always natural, because on occasions of great feeling…the passions should influence the actions’ (Critical Essays, pp. 2, 16). Hunt looked for a correspondence between gesture or ‘external action’ and what he called ‘the action of the mind’; accordingly, he found Hamlet’s many ‘combinations of passion’ to be ‘the most difficult in the English drama’ (Critical Essays, pp. 25, 40–1). A few years later Hunt admired Edmund Kean’s mastery of gesture and countenance, through which he united ‘common life [and] tragedy’ (E, 26 February 1815, and see p. 222). Hunt’s reviews were published as Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres (1807–8), establishing his critical reputation and opening a path on which others were to follow. The book brought him fresh acclaim, and, although largely ignored by modern critics, it helped show the way for the Shakespearean criticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb and

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William Hazlitt, all of whom were concerned with ‘action of the mind’ or, as Byron termed it, ‘mental theatre’.6 From 1808, when he founded the Examiner with his brother John, Hunt was the most prominent liberal journalist in Britain. In 1811 the Examiner was prosecuted for reprinting an article deploring military flogging (for the article see E, 2 September 1810, pp. 557–8); acquittal brought Hunt a letter of ‘sincerest congratulations’ from an Oxford undergraduate, Percy Shelley.7 Then, in 1813, another government prosecution led to heavy fines and gaol sentences for Hunt’s portrayal of the Prince of Wales as a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity!8 It was a truth universally acknowledged, but publishing it in the Examiner cost the Hunt brothers £500 each (an enormous sum at the time) and put them in prison for two years. In Surrey Gaol at Horsemonger Lane Leigh Hunt welcomed celebrity visitors to his cell, which he decorated to resemble a Spenserian bower. Jeremy Bentham and Maria Edgeworth called, as did Thomas Moore and Lord Byron, who nominated Hunt ‘the wit in the dungeon’.9 Charles Cowden Clarke brought ‘a weekly basket of fresh flowers, fruit, and vegetables’ from the garden at Enfield School (for Clarke’s recollection of Hunt in prison, see p. 218). The reality of Hunt’s ‘unwholesome’ and unhealthy surroundings in prison was recalled by another of his visitors, Cyrus Redding (see p. 226). Hunt was depicted in cartoons as ‘A Free Born Englishman’, bound with irons and forcibly silenced (see Figure 1), a martyr for liberty whose release from prison in February 1815 drew an admiring sonnet from John Keats. For Keats, a steady reader of the Examiner since his schooldays, Hunt was a political hero ‘showing truth’ and an example of startling poetic originality in ‘regions of his own’. Although Keats did not meet Hunt until October 1816, by identifying poetry as the spirited song of a free man he accurately sketched the imaginative resources with which Hunt confronted political oppression. His Spenserian bower was a scene of imaginative resistance, a cell of poetic idealism inside the walls of tyranny. Here Hunt revised The Feast of the Poets, his satirical survey of poets past and present; set about completing his poem The Story of Rimini; and continued editing the Examiner which appeared continuously during his imprisonment. As Hunt became aware, however, the claims of poetics and politics could prove mutually exclusive and this was a tension—outlined in his poem ‘Politics and Poetics’— that he would seek to resolve in subsequent years, notably in his complex volume Foliage (1818).10 One addition to The Feast of the Poets was a long note about Wordsworth, evaluating his distinction as a poet and explaining why, in Hunt’s view, he

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Figure

1 ‘A Free Born Englishman! The Pride of the World!’. George Cruikshank’s cartoon is dated 19 April 1813, shortly after Leigh Hunt was sent to Horsemonger Lane Gaol. The image represents the oppression of the whole country, but Cruikshank may well have Hunt particularly in mind. By courtesy of St Andrews University Library.

had at times fallen short of the aims announced in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Hunt’s Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres had shown how to reinvigorate the contemporary stage; now his criticism of Wordsworth was forming the taste for a new age of poetry—praising ‘instances [where Wordsworth] has set the example’ (Feast, p. 93), but also stating perspicuously the ‘defects of a great poet’ (Feast, p. 95). Having noted the exemplary poems that set Wordsworth alongside Spenser and Milton, Hunt identified in Wordsworth a tendency to ‘morbidity’ in treating madness and heightened emotions, and an ‘over-contemplative’ abstraction which ‘turns our thoughts away from society and men altogether’ (Feast, pp. 93–7, 107). Rather than redirecting ‘our thirst for extraordinary intelligence to more genial sources of interest’, Wordsworth ‘substitute[s] one set of diseased perceptions for another’; instead of ‘interesting us in the individuals of our species’, Wordsworth foregrounds himself and ‘makes a business out

Leigh Hunt’s track of radiance

5

of reverie’ (Feast, pp. 93, 96, 97). Self-preoccupation informed Wordsworth’s ‘dangerous art’ of ‘giving importance to actions and situations by our feelings, instead of adapting our feelings to the importance they possess’. This led, Hunt argued, to confusion and perplexity (Feast, pp. 98, 99). In August and October 1814 William Hazlitt took up Hunt’s remarks in his long review of Wordsworth’s Excursion, developing what Hunt had said about Wordsworth’s ‘over-contemplative’ poetry in describing the ‘intense intellectual egotism’ of his long poem (E, 21 August 1814, p. 542). When Keats mentioned the ‘wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’ in his letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818 (LJK, I: p. 387), he was thinking of Hazlitt’s Excursion review, republished in The Round Table (1817). Hazlitt’s influence on Keats is well-known although, in this instance, the idea of Wordsworth’s poetic egotism came to Keats via Hazlitt from Hunt. Hazlitt finds grandeur in Wordsworth’s ‘dangerous art’ of adding ‘a weight of interest from the resources of his own mind, which makes the most insignificant thing serious’, but he follows Hunt in ‘taking leave of [Wordsworth] when he makes pedlars and ploughmen his heroes’ (E, 2 October 1814, p. 636). Chapter 22 of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) takes one of its themes from Hunt in elucidating the ‘characteristic defects of Wordsworth’s poetry’. Among the ‘defects’ listed by Coleridge are several that Hunt had already identified and explained: Hunt wrote of the ‘morbid’ subjects of Wordsworth’s poems, and Coleridge of the ‘wilful selections from human nature…under the least attractive associations’; Hunt noted in Wordsworth an excess of ‘abstraction’, Coleridge an ‘occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying instead of progression of thought’; Hunt’s idea of a ‘dangerous art’ is explained by Coleridge as ‘an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described… a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts…[and] a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and the occasion’.11 Hazlitt’s and Coleridge’s criticisms have long been recognised as among the earliest as well as the most intelligent and perceptive Wordsworth received. 12In his essay on Wordsworth in The Feast of the Poets, Hunt took the lead in identifying the beauties and explaining the defects of Wordsworth’s poetry, thereby initiating the critical reassessment which would establish Wordsworth’s reputation for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While in prison Hunt also worked on his poem The Story of Rimini, and, following his release, it was published in 1816 by John Murray. Readers divided sharply over the poem’s merits. It was praised by the Eclectic Review for an ‘easy graceful style of familiar narrative’; The Edinburgh Review commended a ‘gem of great grace and spirit, and, in many passages and many particulars, of infinite beauty and delicacy’.13 The poem proved popular: it was read widely, and quickly became the focus of controversy with the ‘Cockney School’ essays in Blackwood’s Magazine attributed to ‘Z’ ( John Lockhart and Christopher North). The essays vilified Hunt as vulgar, ill-educated, and, in The Story of Rimini, ‘the secret and invidious foe of

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virtue’.14 For Z it was the manner of the poem, as much as its content, which caused offence. At the centre of The Story of Rimini is the adulterous (and incestuous) relationship of Paulo and Francesca, two lovers rescued by Hunt from Canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno and placed in a modern narrative which valued their ‘fatal passion’ over social ‘forms’ and ‘authorized selfishness’.15 The poem begins with the colourful pageant in which Paulo arrives at Ravenna to wed Francesca as a proxy for his brother, Giovanni. While Francesca gives her ‘hope, belief, love, passion’ to Paulo, the ‘elaborate snare’ of the marriage binds her to ill-tempered Giovanni, and the tragedy which ensues is explored with sympathetic insight. The climax is Paulo and Francesca’s lovemaking, and this part of Hunt’s narrative draws on his theatrical criticism in tracing passionate ‘action of mind’: There’s apt to be, at conscious times like these, An affectation of a bright-eyed ease, An air of something quite serene and sure, As if to seem so, was to be, secure: With this the lovers met, with this they spoke…16 The immediacy of Hunt’s poetry, its affability, its impulsiveness, overlays complex effects. ‘There’s apt to be’, for example, chattily hovering between ‘likely to be’ and the more knowing ‘all too likely to be’, insinuates the natural tendency of Paulo’s and Francesca’s ‘bright-eyed ease’. The lovers, meanwhile, concentrate on the appearance of calm, ‘As if to seem so, was to be, secure’. The Story of Rimini is an artful poem about artful behaviour, as Z noted when he measured Hunt’s shockingly ‘indelicate’ performance against Wordsworth’s ‘purity of thought’ and ‘patriarchal simplicity of feeling’ in The Excursion.17 Ironically, however, The Story of Rimini had been written in a ‘free and idiomatic…language’ of ‘real life’ which drew upon and extended Wordsworth’s experiments in Lyrical Ballads. 18 Where Wordsworth sought to purge the ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology of modern writers’, Hunt’s poetry adopted a ‘spoken jargon’ and explored ‘human passions, human characters, and human incidents’, not in the solitary (‘morbid’) figures favoured by Wordsworth, but among sociable scenes of suburban, domestic, bourgeois life.19 The suburban scene in Hunt’s poem may represent an area of equilibrium between the city and the open countryside, as Stuart Curran contended in his account of Hunt and Wordsworth.20 Equally, as Elizabeth Jones’s chapter points out, the suburbs are dangerous terrain, long associated with license, disease, and insurrection. Here distinct groups—social, ethnic, national—mingle, and their language is appropriately fluid and changeful. Hunt’s genius was to create a poetry of and for this milieu—smart, modern, full of linguistic innovations and written, as Michael O’Neill shows us. as if to the moment. In The Story of Rimini Hunt’s slippery idiomatic language evokes a world of

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spellbinding surface, in which ‘to seem so, was to be’. Rather than recommending suburban ‘pretence, affectation, finery, and gaudiness’, which was how Z read the poem, The Story of Rimini challenges readers to see through superficial ‘forms’ to a clearer appreciation of ‘justice’ and ‘natural impulses’. 21 Among the poem’s later admirers was Elizabeth Barrett, who defended Hunt against his detractors: ‘it never was proved either to my reason or my feelings that Rimini had an immoral tendency. Indeed my belief is exactly the reverse’ (see her letter to Mary Russell Mitford, p. 215). Associated with Hunt in the Cockney School were William Hazlitt, who contributed frequently to the Examiner, and John Keats and Percy Shelley, introduced and championed by Hunt as poets who ‘go directly to Nature for inspiration’.22 These friendships indicate how, from 1815, Hunt’s political campaigning in the Examiner was interwoven with his literary career. His most successful journal, The Indicator (1819–21), was a literary supplement for the Examiner, although political interests were not entirely excluded. The subject of the first Indicator article was Thomas Paine, and when Hunt wrote his long review of Keats’s 1820 collection he showed how the poems displayed ‘the modern philosophy of sympathy and natural justice’ and ‘a high feeling of humanity’.23 Keats, in Hunt’s estimation, was the modern poet of the Rights of Man. Following ‘The Indicator’s Farewell’, which concluded the journal on 21 March 1821, Shelley wrote to Hunt from Pisa reporting Byron’s proposal ‘that you should come and go shares with him and me, in a periodical work [The Liberal] to be conducted here’ (SL, II: p. 344). The circulation of the Examiner was ‘lamentably falling off’ (CLH, I: p. 163), and Hunt had been in poor health. He resigned his editorship and, with his family, set sail for Italy on 15 November 1821. Delayed by storms, they wintered near Plymouth and, having resumed their voyage in the spring, arrived at Genoa on 15 June 1822. Shelley welcomed them rapturously24 but just one week later he was drowned. For Hunt the loss of Shelley was overwhelming, ‘as hard a blow from fortune as could well be given’, and it set the later course of his life and writing (Gates, p. 164). With Byron, Hunt attended Shelley’s cremation on the beach at Viareggio on 16 August, and, in the years following, sought to assuage his grief by ‘dematerializing’ his friend and creating the ‘religion…towards Mr. Shelley’s memory’ in Christianism and The Religion of the Heart.25 In September 1822 the Hunts, Byron and Mary Shelley left Pisa for Albaro, near Genoa, where the Hunts lived with Mary Shelley. Just four numbers of The Liberal were published, 1822–3, containing numerous contributions by Hunt including his ‘Letters from Abroad’, Byron’s The Vision of Judgment and Hazlitt’s My First Acquaintance with Poets. But friendship in this circle quickly grew strained, and financial difficulties broke it up; in September 1823 the Hunts moved across country to Florence where they lived ‘in a primitive manner’ (CLH, I: p. 225;). Money

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was tight and Hunt, regretting that he had surrendered his interest in the Examiner, quarrelled with John about ownership of the paper and payment for articles he had written for the Literary Examiner.26 Keats’s friend Charles Armitage Brown, who was living in Florence, tried valiantly to disentangle their differences.27 While at Florence Hunt wrote his satire on William Gifford, Ultra-Crepidarius, drafting it in the same notebook he had used for a journal of their voyage to Italy, and resumed contributions to the Examiner with his ‘Wishing-Cap’ essays (on which he later drew for his Autobiography). He met Walter Savage Landor and in 1824 was visited by William Hazlitt. Towards the end of that year, Mary Novello wrote to caution ‘against expecting London on your return to be what it was’.28 The Hunts passed six months of 1825 in Florence, then travelled through France, took a steamer across the English channel and, by early December, they were once again settled in London. As Mary Novello indicated, the city was transformed by the new industrial age, with ‘clouds of dust’ from macadamised roads and ‘endless projections’ so that ‘everything is to be improved, but no time for enjoying those improvements’.29 From the notorious circle associated with Hazlitt and Keats, the Shelleys and Byron, Hunt survived into the Victorian age as a poet of ‘kindly enjoyments’ (Foliage, p. 16) who now seemed at odds with the thrusting commercial and imperial spirit of the times. In the following years he edited numerous journals including The Companion (1828), The Tatler (1830–2), and Leigh Hunt’s London Journal (1834–5), and contributed articles to others including Court Magazine (1832– 3), Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine ( January–September 1833), The True Sun (1833–4) and the Monthly Chronicle (1838–40).30 His collected Poetical Works appeared in 1832, and then, in 1835, rumours of war sparked his remarkable protest ballad Captain Sword and Captain Pen—a poem which Edmund Blunden noted was viscerally alert to ‘what can happen to flesh and blood in war’ and also sensitive to ‘the secondary havoc of war’ in the ‘maimed and blood-saddened men…still suffering in hospitals and private houses; and how much offspring, in all probability, is rendered sickly and melancholy’ (Blunden, p. 266, quoting Hunt’s note, PWLH, p. 704). The poem circles between scenes of ‘military gaiety’ (Autobiography, III: p. 237) and battlefield horrors (‘Now see what crawleth, well as it may,/ Out of the ditch, and looketh that way,/What horror all black, in the sick moonlight,/ Kneeling’, 301–3, PWLH, p. 87), and it concludes with ‘the bullet-sense’ of war-mongers succeeded by the peaceful ‘line of Captain Pen’–that is, the company of sages, patriots, and poets: ‘’Twas only for many-souled Captain Pen/To make a world of swordless men’ (554–5, PWLH, p. 93). Emulating Southey’s anti-war poems of the 1790s and Byron’s siege of Ismael Cantos in Don Juan (VII and VIII), in Captain Sword and Captain Pen Hunt writes graphically about war to ‘show what has been hitherto kept concealed’; his notes for the poem should be read by anyone who believes contemporary military propaganda about ‘smart weapons’ and ‘surgical strikes’. Captain

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Sword and Captain Pen is one of the great protest poems in English, with Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, Wilfred Owen’s and Edmund Blunden’s poems of the Great War, and, coming up to the present, James Fenton’s ‘Out of the East’. A notable success of Hunt’s middle years was his play A Legend of Florence (February 1840), which brought him literary and social respectability (it was performed for Queen Victoria). With the support of Carlyle and Macaulay, he obtained a modest pension from the government, ensuring some financial security. A few years later his critical essays in Imagination and Fancy (1844) combined Romantic poetic theory with close readings of poems from Spenser to Keats (for Hunt’s admiration for Coleridge, ‘a perfectionist in poetry, whose thought and rhythm were one’, see p. 227). Hunt’s commentary on The Eve of St. Agnes brought out the poem’s psychological acuity, consolidating Keats’s reputation for nineteenthcentury readers and opening the way for Richard Monckton Milnes’s biography of the poet (1848). Hunt’s Autobiography, published in 1850, drew on material from an early ‘Memoir’ in the Monthly Mirror (April 1810) and on Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828). Now ‘free from anger’ (Autobiography, III: p. 3), Hunt had moderated his earlier comments about Byron. Reviews of the Autobiography were on balance favourable: Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine welcomed ‘a sketch of literary history for the last fifty years’ and, finding in Hunt a ‘link between us and men two generations ago’, suggested the elusive temper of the life and the book: He belongs essentially to that period of society which is...characterised by the term transitional. Loosened from the moorings of the departing, and not yet linked to the coming system of thought, he floats at large between them with a sort of easy scepticism.31 This seems right. Hunt was a lifelong admirer of Collins and Gray, whose poetry of sensibility he had imitated in Juvenilia, and he lived long enough to contemplate a modernist poem on ‘the wonders of steam and electricity’ (PWLH, p. 700). Thomas Carlyle, a close friend, praised Hunt’s Autobiography as an ‘excellently good Book’ that ‘will be welcome to other generations as well as to ours’ (see p. 217). A second edition was called for. Hunt prepared this for the press (December 1859; the title page is dated 1860) and by 1906 there had been ten printings of it.32 More often recalled from this time, however, is Charles Dickens’s caricature in Bleak House (1853). Harold Skimpole, ‘an absolute reproduction of a real man’, represented Hunt’s ‘elate’ spirit as breezily irresponsible—‘so free from effort and spontaneous…a romantic youth who had undergone some unique process of depreciation’.33 In some respects Hunt’s attitude to publishing represented the easy-going arrangements of earlier times, and he happily confessed to a ‘habit of inattention to money

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matters’ which, over the years, led to some nasty scrapes.34 His 1832 Poetical Works was supported by a subscription announced in the New Monthly Magazine for March 1832, which brought together ‘men of opposite politics’ on ‘this common ground of literary fellowship’. Impressive names were recruited, including Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, D’lsraeli, the Lords Holland, Dover and Mulgrave, Francis Jeffrey, Thomas Campbell and ‘the venerable Godwin’.35 On publication of the book, however, a slip of paper inserted between the preliminary pages informed readers that the subscription list was ‘withheld at present, that it may be published in a more perfect state in… JANUARY [1833]’.36 By October 1832 the list had led to a ‘very awkward misconstruction’ between Hunt and his publisher, with the suspicion of some kind of ‘double dealing’ on Hunt’s part.37 By living from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century Hunt witnessed the emergence of authorship as a commercially driven profession. In this new environment he appeared to embody an unbusinesslike ‘artistic bohemianism’—culpably so, in Dickens’s eyes. 38 In creating Harold Skimpole, however, Dickens chose to overlook Hunt’s astute sense of the literary marketplace and the extent to which he had sought to exploit its opportunities. The Literary Pocket-Book, first published in December 1818, for example, was aimed at Christmas sales and the emerging fashion for souvenir or ‘keepsake’ volumes. His anthology Readings for Railways (1849) catered for a new readership among the Victorian travelling public. Dickens’s depreciation of Hunt proved influential, and Elizabeth Barrett rightly believed that ‘he has been wronged by many’ (see p. 215). Ian Jack’s survey of Hunt, for example, contains some paradoxical claims reflecting nineteenth-century prejudices. In that Hunt edited the Examiner for some fourteen years and was ‘courageous in facing political opposition’, he was certainly ‘not a political animal’ ( Jack’s words): the ‘Prospectus’ to the Examiner had defiantly proclaimed the paper’s ‘IMPARTIALITY’ in ‘POLITICS’.39 Jack’s observation, however, is meant to diminish, and his account of Hunt’s literary life betrays a similar bias. He points out, correctly, that if judged by the number of times he is right about his contemporaries… Hunt has no rival in the history of English criticism’ (an observation echoed in this book by Michael O’Neill). Yet, having acknowledged Hunt’s critical acumen, Jack unaccountably dismisses him as a ‘dilettante, a connoisseur, with something of the superficiality that the term implies’.40 It is this mistaken, Skimpolish idea of Hunt which has led to him being described as a ‘charming and vivacious but very improvident’ poet, who ‘affected Keats for the worse’.41 One of the purposes of the present volume is to redress such underestimates of Hunt. To further that purpose, the book includes a chapter of ‘Interviews and Recollections’ relating to Hunt. As those accounts demonstrate, following Hunt’s death on 28 August 1859, he was never overlooked or forgotten, although overshadowed by Byron, Shelley and Keats. He continued to appeal to Alfred Tennyson and D.G.Rossetti, whose careers he had fostered,

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as well as to admirers like William Allingham, Elizabeth Barrett, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Macaulay, A.C.Swinburne and Virginia Woolf.42 By the 1920s, when John Betjeman published his first poems, Hunt was re-emerging as a writer in tune with the times albeit one who (like William Blake) was not included in the canon of English Romantic poets which he had helped to establish. In the years following the First World War, English poetry was characterised by the modernism of Pound and Eliot, and by the Romantic lyricism of two poets who served on the Western Front: Edward Thomas (killed in 1918) and Edmund Blunden (who survived). The post-war era was a period when Leigh Hunt had renewed appeal—when his hard-won philosophy of ‘cheerfulness’, set against the unsparing realism of Captain Sword and Captain Pen, once again communicated his belief that ‘[w]e should consider ourselves as…creatures made to enjoy more than to know, to know infinitely nevertheless in proportion as we enjoy kindly, and finally, to put our own shoulders to the wheel and get out of the mud upon the green sward again’.43 In 1923 Humphrey Milford published the first full edition of Hunt’s Poetical Works, followed seven years later by Edmund Blunden’s Leigh Hunt: A Biography and Leigh Hunt’s ‘Examiner’ Examined, 1808–1825. Blunden observed that ‘ [a] careful life of Leigh Hunt should have been written many years ago, when some who had known him were alive, and when the documents were still mainly assembled’.44 When Blunden was researching, Hunt’s contemporaries were long dead, and his papers and books dispersed around the globe.45 Blunden nevertheless incorporated material then ‘new to print’ and his narrative, which shares the sympathetic qualities of Hunt’s own prose, avoided ‘bristling references’ and footnotes (Blunden, p. xiii). It was followed in 1936 by a scholarly porcupine, the remarkable two-volume study by Louis Landré: Leigh Hunt (1784–1859): Contribution à l’histoire du Romantisme Anglais. ‘Leigh Hunt est une de ces figures un peu indistinctes de l’histoire littéraire’, Landré begins (evoking Hunt’s appeal for Betjeman); over some 900 pages, his book documents Hunt’s life and writings in exhaustive detail. Landré drew from British and American archives, and acknowledged the assistance of Luther Brewer whose books My Leigh Hunt Library: The First Editions (1932) and The Holograph Letters (1938) describe his collection of Huntiana now at the University of Iowa Library. Landré also built on the researches of George Stout, who in 1928 had completed a Harvard doctoral thesis, ‘Studies towards a Biography of Leigh Hunt’. And he mentions the interest of Edmund Blunden—‘le délicat poète anglais’.46 Landré’s book has not been translated into English, and is available only in the original paperbound edition of 1936. The second half of the twentieth century saw editions of Hunt’s political essays and dramatic criticism by Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens. Donald Reiman’s The Romantics Reviewed reprinted in

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facsimile Hunt reviewing, and reviewed by, his contemporaries. Biographical approaches have included Ann Blainey’s Immortal Boy (a Skimpolish title); James R.Thompson’s useful study in the Twayne’s English Authors Series; and, focusing on Hunt’s later years, Molly Tatchell’s Leigh Hunt and his Family in Hammersmith. David Cheney has long been gathering materials for a complete edition of Hunt’s letters; in the meantime, Eleanor Gates’s Leigh Hunt: A Life In Letters supplemented Thornton Hunt’s selective Correspondence of 1862. For most of the later twentieth century, academic criticism overlooked Hunt. He had no place in M.H.Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism (1971), although Hunt’s The Nymphs’ and The Religion of the Heart present significant variations on Abrams’s theme. Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company (1961) noticed Hunt only to point out how in the ‘Ode on Indolence’ Keats bids farewell to the ‘pseudo-pastoral namby-pamby land of Leigh Hunt’. Bloom was right about Hunt’s ‘pseudo-pastoral’, but, like Z and William Michael Rossetti, was unable to see more than a disreputable example cast aside in Keats’s advance to the ‘vision of tragic humanism that ends his career as a poet’.47 It was difficult to entertain the ‘Visionary Company’ in Hunt’s studio at the Vale of Health, or to find ‘Prometheus Rising’ in sonnets about Hampstead Heath. Catching the drift and missing the point, Z had already observed that Hunt’s sociable, suburban nature was ‘altogether unacquainted’ with solitary sublime experience: ‘he has never seen any mountain higher than Highgate-hill’.48 Hunt’s poetry deliberately does not aim for the visionary peaks and verbal intensities of Wordsworth and Shelley. And, given Hunt’s themes as a poet and journalist, it’s surprising that he fared little better in Romantic New Historicist studies of the 1980s. Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology and Beauty of Inflections, and Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, mentioned Hunt in passing, and in connection with the male-dominated Romantic canon. The canon has since expanded to include women writers like Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Tighe, all of whom, by the way, were recommended by Hunt in his essay ‘Specimens of British Poetesses’.49 Yet modern anthologies of Romantic poetry haven’t been so generous in accommodating Hunt. The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse includes an extract from the third canto of The Story of Rimini (the scene of adulterous seduction); Duncan Wu’s Romanticism: An Anthology reprints four of Hunt’s sonnets, his prose poem ‘A Now’, and ‘Rondeau’ (‘Nelly kissed me’).50 Anne Mellor’s and Richard Matlak’s British Literature, 1780–1830 does not include Hunt. This situation is unaccountable in that the revisionary challenge to the old Romantic canon—male, solitary, egotistical, exclusive—had been anticipated by Hunt’s alternative to the Wordsworth-Coleridge axis of English Romanticism—as Jeffrey Robinson reveals in this book. But times are changing. Keats’s bicentenary (1995) and the historical emphasis of Romantic studies have encouraged a resurgence of interest in

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Leigh Hunt. Hunt figured prominently in two bicentenary volumes, Keats and History (1995) and Keats: Bicentenary Readings (1998) and in such studies as Rodney Stenning Edgecombe’s Leigh Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy (1994); Jeffrey Cox’s Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School (1998); Richard Cronin’s The Politics of Romantic Poetry (2000); and Ayumi Mizukoshi’s Keats, Hunt, and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (2001). A new multi-volume edition of his writings is in prospect. Leigh Hunt’s fortunes are rising, and the moment is right for a collection of critical and scholarly essays in which Hunt is the focus of attention. The chapters in Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics are arranged thematically and with a chronological sequence. In ‘Leigh Hunt: some early matters’, I focus on Hunt’s years at Christ’s Hospital, 1791–9. I explore violence in the school and Hunt’s idealisation of friendship, showing how these influenced his poetry in Juvenilia and Examiner journalism. Towards the end of the chapter I argue that Hunt’s reading of Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ prompted his own retrospect of Christ’s Hospital in ‘Remembered Friendship’, a poem echoed by Keats at the conclusion of his ‘Ode to Psyche’. I also conjecture that the ‘Ode to Psyche’ may stand behind Hunt’s accounts of his prison ordeal, and that Keats’s ‘rosy sanctuary’ recalled Hunt’s cell ‘papered…with a trellis of roses’. A welcome visitor to Hunt’s cell was Charles Cowden Clarke. In ‘Leigh Hunt and Charles Cowden Clarke, 1812–18’, John Barnard presents correspondence relating to one of Hunt’s most significant personal relationships. The letters, many transcribed from manuscripts, present firsthand evidence about the Hunt-Clarke friendship, including their poetry and politics. All give valuable insights into the Hunt circle, its aesthetic values and Hunt’s musical interests. The next chapters lead us into the circle of writers, painters and musicians gathered around Hunt following his release from prison. In ‘Leigh Hunt’s Foliage: a Cockney manifesto’, Jeffrey Cox establishes Hunt’s Foliage (1818) as a ‘key volume’ for the fertile community—the Cockney School—from which issued the collective work of Hunt, Keats, Hazlitt, Shelley, Byron and others. Hunt’s book evokes the Cockney School through poems addressed to named individuals, literally recreating the communal life and work of the poets, artists and intellectuals with whom Hunt associated. Focusing on The Nymphs’ and translations from ancient poets such as Catullus, Cox demonstrates how those poems in Foliage gave classical authority for attacking contemporary oppression and for the Cockneys’ celebration of ‘a sensual heaven on earth’. In the fifth chapter, ‘Suburb sinners: sex and disease in the Cockney School’, Elizabeth Jones draws attention to Z’s preoccupation in the Cockney School essays with prostitution, social degradation and disease, all of which plagued London’s suburbs from the Middle Ages onwards. By the early nineteenth century conditions had improved, but Z’s critique successfully revived and played upon fears of the suburban demi-monde.

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Hunt, Jones argues, belonged to the new suburban class: its values of individuality, idiosyncrasy and accumulation (represented by Hunt’s studio at the Vale of Health) were components of the ‘gardenesque’ aesthetic of the house and garden designer, J.C.Loudon. By reminding readers of the ‘sinful suburbs’, Z sought to counter a mobile, insurgent class and culture; one of the battlegrounds, in the Cockney School essays, was Hunt’s poetry of intimate domestic life. Jane Stabler’s chapter, ‘Leigh Hunt’s aesthetics of intimacy’, explores through close readings how Hunt’s poetry brought together private and public spheres, for example in The Story of Rimini and ‘Jenny Kissed Me’. In so doing he violated propriety for some readers, while demonstrating delicacy and sensitivity for the many Victorian readers who welcomed his treatment of the story of Paulo and Francesca. Stabler draws attention to Hunt’s socially responsible aesthetics of intimacy, suggesting that this marks a change in nineteenth-century sensibility highlighted by Tennyson’s voyeuristic treatment of the Lady Godiva legend. The aesthetics of Hunt’s poetry and his relations with other writers are treated by Greg Kucich, Michael O’Neill and Jeffrey Robinson. In ‘Cockney chivalry: Hunt, Keats and the aesthetics of excess’, Kucich’s subject is Hunt’s poetic style. Identifying the ‘spoken jargon’ of Cockney English as a vital linguistic context, Kucich shows that this ‘established form of radical discourse’ was the distinctive stylistic feature of Hunt’s poetry. He argues that Hunt’s decorated cell at Surrey Gaol was a parodic Regency court, and a stylistic model for his prison poetry in The Feast of the Poets, The Descent of Liberty and The Story of Rimini The chapter shows decisively the ‘integrity and coherence’ of Hunt’s poetic style, and how this formed a sustained effort to ‘reimagine’ a liberated world from ‘within the iron centre of despotism, prejudice, and self-interest’. In the closing sections of his chapter, Kucich suggests Hunt’s fertile presence in Keats’s later poems. Michael O’Neill’s chapter, ‘“Even Now While I Write”: Leigh Hunt and Romantic Spontaneity’, reveals the subtlety and artfulness with which Hunt’s poetry contrives immediacy. In close readings of The Story of Rimini, The Feast of the Poets and To Thomas Moore’ O’Neill demonstrates Hunt’s skill as a maker of English verse, in poetry which is ‘alive to “the demand of the moment” ’. Giving Hunt credit for a ‘new poetics of spontaneity’, O’Neill makes far-reaching reassessments of his relations with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Knowing Hunt better, O’Neill shows us, brings the bonus of a fresh understanding of other poets and poems. In ‘Leigh Hunt and the poetics and politics of the fancy’, Jeffrey Robinson argues that Hunt’s Foliage responded to Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria by upgrading the Fancy as a faculty of Bacchic energies, tolerant, genial, just, delighting in the play of opposites and multitudes. Ranging widely through Hunt’s writings Robinson identifies in Huntian Fancy a ‘counter-poetics of

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the Romantic period’ which amounts to a fresh image of Romantic literary culture and anticipates the ‘open-form poetics of the twentieth century’. The chapters by Kim Wheatley and Rodney Stenning Edgecombe investigate Hunt’s later career. Wheatley takes as her subject Hunt’s lifelong contempt for the Tory satirist and critic William Gifford, explaining how and why their quarrel lasted so long. Hunt’s sense that he needed ‘something at stake’ in the plight of another is shown to explain, in part, the curiously repetitive nature of Hunt’s statements. Wheatley’s close reading of UltraCrepidarius (1823) reveals a tour de force of a peculiarly Huntian kind, incorporating aspects of his manner in The Story of Rimini and Foliage, and presenting a catalogue of things ‘at stake’ by way of identifying and ‘conceiving’, or inventing, its target. ‘“Seeing with final eyes”: Leigh Hunt, Design, Immortality’ by Rodney Stenning Edgecombe draws upon Hunt’s religious thought in later writings such as Christianism (1832), The Religion of the Heart (1853) and his poem ‘Reflections of a Dead Body’ (1837). Hunt refused to abandon his belief that human identity survives death, but dispensed with other aspects of Christianity in favour of a ‘half-secular faith in the fitness of things’ disclosed through the retrospection of ‘final eyes’. As Edgecombe shows, Hunt was no better able than Christians to account for the problem of suffering. The chapter concludes with a close reading of Hunt’s strange dramatic monologue ‘Reflections of a Dead Body’, in which ‘the soul within the dead body soliloquizes’ and traces in the experience of mortality a brightening assurance: ‘so well/I know the end, and how thou’lt smile hereafter’. The volume ends with ‘Leigh Hunt: Interviews and Recollections, 1832– 1921’, presenting views of Hunt from nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. The material includes accounts of Hunt in prison, at the theatre and at some of his many homes. There are items on Hunt’s personality, his literary achievements and reputation, and his religion; on the Skimpole controversy; and on the succession to the Laureateship in 1850. Cyrus Redding cuts through myth to disclose the distressing actuality of Hunt’s imprisonment; Virginia Woolf aligns Hunt with ‘free, vigorous spirits [who] advance the world’. Like all of the essays in this book, these voices from earlier generations encourage us to read Hunt afresh and to follow, with heightened appreciation, what Thomas Carlyle called Leigh Hunt’s ‘track of radiance’.

Notes 1 ‘Desert Island Discs’, 12 April 1975, from ‘John Betjeman: Recollections from the BBC Archives’, BBC Audio Cassette (London, 1998). 2 Summoned By Bells (London: John Murray, 1960), p. 3.

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3 See John Betjeman, ‘City and Suburban (4)’ in Coming Home: An Anthology of Prose (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 339, and John Betjeman to Faith Compton Mackenzie, 22 January 1948, in John Betjeman: Letters Volume One: 1926 to 1951, ed. Candida Lycett Green (London: Methuen, 1994), p. 436. 4 Blunden, p. 29. 5 For Hunt’s family background see Blunden, pp. 1–10. 6 An exception is Jonathan Bate. See Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 136 n. 7 For the article on flogging, which was republished from The Stamford News, see E (2 September 1810), pp. 557–8. For Shelley’s letter to Hunt, 2 March 1811, see SL, I: pp. 54–5. 8 E (22 March 1812), p. 179. 9 See BLJ, III: p. 49. 10 ‘Politics and Poetics’ was first published in Hunt’s Reflector Magazine (1811); he revised it while in prison, and included it in Feast (1815), pp. 163–71. 11 Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W.J.Bate, CC 7, 2 vols (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Routledge, 1983), II: pp. 119, 136, and see the Coleridgean associations of ‘eddy’ in p. 136 n. 1. 12 See Stephen Gill’s remarks on Hazlitt in William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 304. 13 The Eclectic Review, 2 series, V (April 1816), p. 380; The Edinburgh Review, XXVI ( June 1816), p. 477. 14 See ‘Letter from Z. to Leigh Hunt, King of the Cockneys’, BM (May 1818), p. 200. 15 See Hunt’s explanation of the ‘spirit’ of The Story of Rimini in his preface to Foliage, p. 17. 16 See Rimini, p. 77 17 ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No I’, BM (October 1817), p. 40. 18 See Rimini, p. xv, and Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 50, hereafter Curran. 19 The quotations are from Wordsworth’s 1798 ‘Advertisement’ to Lyrical Ballads, WPW, p. 591. 20 Curran, p. 50. 21 Foliage, p. 17. 22 See ‘Young Poets’, E (1 December, 1816), pp. 761–2. Also introduced by Hunt was John Hamilton Reynolds. 23 Indicator, XLIV (9 August 1820), p. 352. This was the second section of Hunt’s review; the first appeared in the issue for 2 August 1820. 24 Hunt’s eldest son, Thornton, a favourite of Shelley’s, recalled ‘his crying out that he was “so inexpressibly delighted!—you cannot think how inexpressibly happy it makes me!”’. See Thornton Hunt, ‘Shelley. By One who Knew Him’, Atlantic Monthly, XI (1863), pp. 189–90. 25 See Gates, p. 190 and Timothy Webb, ‘Religion of the Heart: Leigh Hunt’s Unpublished Tribute to Shelley’, K-SR (1992), pp. 1–61 26 See CLH, II: pp. 167–8, Gates, pp. 151–2, and the agitated letter from Hunt to his brother, 6 January 1824, about writing, health and money, now in the Novello-Clarke papers, Brotherton Library, Leeds University. 27 For Charles Brown’s efforts see the letters in British Library Add. Mss 38108, and Brown’s letter to Leigh Hunt, 20 August 1824, alerting him to eight reasons

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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why John Hunt objected ‘to your continuance as partner’, setting out an answer to ‘every objection’ raised, and ‘giv[ing] an opinion…entirely against’ John Hunt (Novello-Clarke papers). Hunt forwarded the letter on 6 September 1824 to show to his brother. Letter of 19 December 1824, British Library Add. Mss 38108. British Library, Add. Mss 38108. For full details see Landré, II: pp. 496–501. See Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (September 1850), p. 65. See Autobiography, Earliest Sketches, p. vi, and Timothy Webb, ‘Correcting the Irritability of his Temper’, in Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 268–90. Hunt also drew upon his manuscript ‘Recollections & Memorandums written during my imprisonment in Surrey Jail’, now in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and on ‘Letters from Abroad’ in the Liberal and the Wishing-Cap Essays in the Examiner. See Dickens to Mrs Watson, 21 September 1853, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Kathleen Tillotson, Graham Storey et al. (11 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–99), VII: p. 154; Bleak House, ed. G.Ford and S.Monod (New York: W.W.Norton, 1977), p. 65. For Skimpole and Hunt see Luther A. Brewer, Leigh Hunt and Charles Dickens (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1930), and, for Skimpole as an ‘ironic anti-Hunt’, see Adam Roberts, ‘Skimpole, Leigh Hunt and Dickens’s “Remonstrance” ’, The Dickensian (Winter 1996), pp. 177–86. Letter to John Hunt, 6 January 1824 (Novello-Clarke papers). See The New Monthly Magazine, XXXIV (March 1832), p. 289. Slip preliminary to p. i. in PWLH (1832). See Gates, pp. 241–2. An argument made by K.J.Fielding, ‘Leigh Hunt and Skimpole: Another Remonstrance’, The Dickensian, 64, 1 ( January 1968), pp. 5–9. See E (3 January 1808), p. 7. See lan jack, English Literature, 1815–1832: Scott, Byron, and Keats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963; 1990), pp. 320–4. Jack repeats William Michael Rossetti, sometimes word for word. According to Rossetti, Hunt was ‘a liberal thinker in the morals both of society and of politics (hardly a politician in the stricter sense of the term)…He understood good literature both instinctively and critically; but was too full of tricksy mannerisms, and of petted byways in thought’. William Michael Rossetti, Life of John Keats (London: Walter Scott, 1887), p. 21. See the otherwise helpful profile of Hunt in F.B.Pinion, A Keats Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 145–7. Hunt published a favourable review of Alfred Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) in the Tatler (24 and 26 February 1831). In 1848 Rossetti was ‘exhilarated’ by Hunt’s ‘flattering’ encouragement of his poetry; see Rossetti’s letter to Charlotte Lydia Polidori, 12 April 1848, The Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. O.Doughty and J.R.Wahl (4 vols, Oxford, 1965–7), I: pp. 37–8. For Virginia Woolf on Hunt, see p. 229 below, and The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (5 vols, London: The Hogarth Press, 1977– 84), II: p. 130, entry for 13 August 1921. Foliage, p. 16. Blunden, p. xi. Hunt’s son-in-law Charles Smith Cheltnam recalled that Hunt’s library of some

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Nicholas Roe ‘two thousand volumes’ was sold to an American bookseller after his death; ms. ‘Recollections of Leigh Hunt’, British Library Add. Mss 46202. Landré, I: pp. 7, 12. Stout’s biography remains unpublished. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, revised and enlarged edition (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1961; 1971), p. 421. ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. I’, BM (October 1817), p. 34. See MWB: II: pp. 129–59. The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, ed. Jerome J.McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 399–401; Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (2nd edn., Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 620–4.

2

Leigh Hunt Some early matters Nicholas Roe

Christ’s Hospital has gathered an aura of myth as the ‘fam’d school’ of ‘youthful bards’ and Romantic genius, a reputation to which Leigh Hunt contributed with his poem ‘Christ’s Hospital’ in which he recalled the school’s ‘sacred cloister’d walks/That saw my early days pass quiet on’.1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb were educated there, and their recollections in ‘Frost at Midnight’, Biographia Literaria and ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’ hark back to scenes in the ‘day-spring’ of their lives. At Christ’s Hospital, with its dreamy ‘cloisters dim’, Coleridge the ‘inspired charity-boy’ had discovered Bowles’s poetry and made visitors pause, intranced with admiration’, when he recited Homer. Hunt, too, came to look on Christ’s Hospital as the seedbed of ‘original geniuses’, remarking on how at the close of the eighteenth century it had ‘sent out more living writers, in its proportion, than any other school’.2 In his Autobiography he lists George Richards (1767–1837), whose Songs of the Aboriginal Bards of Britain appealed to the fashionable taste for ‘primitive’ poetry; Thomas Skinner Surr (1770–1847), banker, novelist and author of The Magic of Wealth; and George Townsend (1788–1857) who bid for immortality with Armageddon: A Poem. It’s clear that Christ’s Hospital helped to advance the careers of non-aristocratic writers—a reputation which may explain some of the bitter attacks Hunt’s poetry received, and Byron’s remark that Hunt was ‘a good man…but spoilt by the ChristChurch Hospital’, much as his imprisonment in ‘Surry Jail…conceited him into a martyr’.3 As the myth of Christ’s Hospital grew, the actuality of life in the school was overlooked or given a nostalgic glow. This idealisation is surprising since, as we shall see, the account of Christ’s Hospital in Hunt’s Autobiography is sharply at odds with the ‘[s]weet spot of innocence and joy’ in his early ‘Christ’s Hospital’ poem. For Hunt the school was an ancient English institution, with associations going back to ‘the famous Whittington’ and beyond, ‘solid, unpretending, of good character, and free to all’.4 But for the schoolboys it was also a place of terror, stalked at night by an eerie presence

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called the ‘Fazzer’. The Fazzer was in fact nothing more than one of the boys, but also ‘audacious, unknown, and frightening’ and of ‘supernatural fearfulness’—an emanation of the bullying and sadistic violence that made up the day-to-day reality of the boys’ lives. Long after Coleridge had left Christ’s Hospital his experiences there revived in nightmares, and he confided in a Notebook, ‘the more distressful my Sleep, & alas! how seldom is it otherwise, the more distant, & Xst’s Hospitalized the forms & incidents’.5 In this entry Coleridge was describing dreams which were a ‘distorted Reflection’ of his feelings for Sara Hutchinson (Wordsworth’s sister-in-law). Another of his nightmares shows us what ‘Xst’s Hospitalized’ meant: —a mixture of Xts Hospital Church/escapes there—lose myself/trust to two People, one Maim’d, one unknown/insulted by a fat sturdy Boy of about 14, like a Bacchus/who dabs a flannel in my face, (or rather soft hair brown Shawl stuff)(was this a flannel Night-cap?) he attacks me/I call to my Friends—they come & join in the Hustle against me—out rushes a university Harlot, who insists on my going with her/offer her a shilling—seem to get away a moment/when she overtakes me again/I am not to go with another while she is ‘biting’—these were her words… In the early part of the Dream, Boyer, & two young Students… Legrice & I quizzing…6 The ‘early part’ of the dream related to the school. From this comes the urge to escape, then the descent into a nightmare in which grotesque figures and scenes of prostitution and sexual terror are entangled with his schooldays. The ‘friends’ to whom he calls for help, only to have them ‘join in the Hustle’, are apparently Coleridge’s schoolmaster, Boyer, and students from Christ’s Hospital. These nightmares were no doubt induced by Coleridge’s opium-taking, but Hunt (who wasn’t an addicted opium-eater) had waking memories of the school that were equally disturbing. When Hunt entered the school it had some 600 pupils, accommodated in twelve wards or dormitories. In Hunt’s time the wards had ‘rows of beds on each side, partitioned off, but connected with one another, and each having two boys to sleep in it’. Placed in the middle were ‘binns for holding bread’ and hanging from the ceiling was a large chandelier.7 Each ward was in the care of a nurse, who was responsible for the boys’ welfare. These nurses were ‘almost invariably decent people’, Hunt writes, and his ‘almost’ carries some emphasis, since Hunt was later assigned to a nurse who ‘conducted herself very ill, & kept us very dirty’.8 Hunt’s days were strictly regimented: he would rise to the ‘call of a bell’ at 6.00 a.m. in summer and 7.00 a.m. in winter, wash in cold water and dry himself with a coarse towel, then at another bell he would go to breakfast (dry bread or ‘crug’, and watery beer) which was followed by school until 11.00 a.m. Then came an hour’s play, and the bell for lunch. This was the

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main meal of the day, but week by week it was miserably scanty and unvaried: Sunday: boiled beef and broth (with throat-stopping ‘gags’ of beef fat). Monday: crug, butter, milk and water. Tuesday: roast mutton—a ‘small slice’. Wednesday: crug and butter with rice milk, ‘ludicrously thin’ but with sugar, ginger or cinnamon to make it palatable. Thursday: boiled beef and broth, again with gags of fat. Friday: ‘scanty crags’ of boiled mutton and broth. Saturday: crug and butter, and ‘pease porritch’. All the food was portioned so that appetites were damped, not satisfied, and since there were no vegetables the boys’ diet was unhealthily deficient.9 Afternoon classes ran from 1.00 p.m. until 4.00 p.m. in the winter (5.00 p.m. in summer), then there was crug and cheese for supper at 6.00 p.m. and, in winter, bed afterwards. On Sundays the school hours of the weekdays were passed in Christ Church, Newgate Street, where the boys were seated high up in the galleries on either side of the organ. With the preacher droning on hour after hour, these long services were excruciatingly ‘somniferous’ (Hunt’s word) and relieved only by fidgeting or by whispered caricatures of the preacher. Hunt recalls that one was famous among the boys for saying ‘murracles’ instead of ‘miracles’. Another seemed to have only two audible phrases, with an interval of humming between them; the boys mimicked his sermons like this: ‘the dispensation of Moses, hmmm, or, Mosaic dispensation, hmmmm, was dispensed by Moses, hmmmmm, as his Mosaic dispensation…’10 That Hunt recalled these impersonations years afterwards shows how keen he had been to belong to the boys’ community. But at first the severity and tedium of the routine, and the lack of nourishing food, were an awful transition for him. As a 7-year-old ‘new boy’ he was shy, sickly and tearful; quarrels alarmed him and taunts from other boys and from the masters provoked his stammering. Medical care was, inevitably, crude and painful; probably he endured the standard treatment for the ‘itch’ and ringworm, which was rubbing with sulphur ointment. He recalled that he wasn’t allowed to stay overnight out of the school except for three weeks’ holiday in the summer (such restrictions encouraged some boys to go ‘skulking’ on adventures out of bounds). But gradually the ‘regularity and restriction’ of the hours became a strength for him, giving his life a shape and direction.11 His family’s timetable had been dictated by circumstance or the claims of creditors; this one was predictable and, to that extent, reassuring. And not everything was as harsh as the day-to-day routine; on one occasion Hunt was confined to the sick ward after scalding his legs and enjoyed weeks of ‘delicious’ recovery when he could read his books, and play the flute for his

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nurse’s daughter.12 In those sickroom days Hunt took on a role which he would play over again in later years: the invalid and the flirt. The academic structure of Christ’s Hospital was divided into schools. The Writing and Reading schools taught literacy, and the skills necessary for trade and commerce; the Mathematical and Drawing Schools trained boys for the navy and East India Company. And the Under and Upper Grammar Schools gave boys the classical education necessary at that time for careers in the law and the Church. The Upper School comprised two classes, called Little and Great Erasmus; over them were more senior scholars, known as Deputy Grecians, and at the pinnacle were the Grecians, who were destined for university. Because Hunt could read, and already knew some Latin, he was put at first into the Under Grammar School. The master was the genial and languid Mr Field, and under his ‘handsomely incompetent’ tuition Hunt’s ‘grammar always seemed to open in the same place’.13 He made steady progress nevertheless, and proceeded in due course to the Upper School, which was overseen by the sadistic James Boyer, a short stout man, inclining to punchiness, with large face and hands, an aquiline nose, long upper lip, and a sharp mouth. His eye was close and cruel. The spectacles which he wore threw a balm over it. Being a clergyman, he dressed in black, with a powdered wig. His clothes were cut short; his hands hung out of the sleeves, with tight wrist bands, as if ready for execution; and as he generally wore grey worsted stockings, very tight, with a little balustrade leg, his whole appearance presented something formidably succinct, hard, and mechanical. This is Sweeney in the C of E, his clergyman’s gown unable to contain his squat, brutal form: ‘I should have pitied him’, Hunt says, ‘if he had taught us to do anything but fear’. He credits Boyer with being ‘a good verbal scholar…conscientiously acting up to the letter of time and attention’, echoing Coleridge’s view that Boyer was a ‘zealous and conscientious’ teacher. But Hunt also suspects that Boyer was not, at heart, a teacher with a sense of vocation—devoted to the spirit, as well as the letter, of his profession.14 Under Boyer Hunt studied Ovid, Virgil, Terence, the Greek Testament and, as a Deputy Grecian, Homer, Cicero, and Demosthenes. But, as he says, ‘few of us cared for any of the books that were taught: and no pains were taken to make us do so’.15 In his first days at the school Hunt was timid and confused, which made his stutter grow worse. The boys teased and imitated him, but his treatment from the masters was far worse. On one occasion ‘in a fit of impatience’ Boyer hit him across the face with the spine of a book with such force that it knocked out one of his teeth. Boyer relished ‘spiting’ some individuals, thumping and slapping, kicking and beating them. Even Coleridge, of whom Boyer allegedly thought highly, generally received ‘at the end of a

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flogging an extra cut’ because in Boyer’s eyes he was ‘such an ugly fellow!’ He had a trick, Hunt recalls, ‘of pinching you under the chin, and by the lobes of the ears, till he made the blood come’; ‘many times [he] lifted a boy off the ground’ by his ears. And Hunt comes close to accusing Boyer of murder: ‘I have seen him beat a sickly-looking boy about the head and ears, till the poor fellow, hot, dry-eyed, and confused, seemed lost in bewilderment’. Adding that ‘not long after’ this same boy ‘died out of his senses’, Hunt remarks: ‘there is no saying how far [Boyer’s] treatment of the boy might have contributed to prevent a cure’.16 If we glance back at the portrait of Boyer’s thick-set, ‘punchy’ physique, it’s noticeable that it seems to be overlaid with the costume of capital retribution. Boyer’s grotesquely tight stockings and wrist bands with ‘hands hung out’, suggest the idea that he is trussed-up in a strait-waistcoat and, as Hunt says, ‘ready for execution’. In later life Coleridge and Lamb joked about Boyer’s addiction to flogging, giving a comic slant to the scenes of persecution which revived in Coleridge’s nightmares. Hunt also remarked that Victorian educational reforms had helped to moderate ‘many bitter reflections’.17 So Boyer’s reputation as a teacher has survived, although Hunt was in no doubt that this brutal man was a tyrant and a criminal—the worst possible mentor and example for the boys in his charge. Boyer’s viciousness was aped by senior boys, who as ‘monitors’ were in authority in the wards and elsewhere in the school. Shortly after Hunt arrived one head boy tore his ‘History of England’ out of his hands, using a hook which he carried around with him to spike and steal apples, cakes and books. There was one monitor, Hunt remembers, who entertained himself by pelting boys’ heads ‘with a hard ball’. He’d order a boy to hand the ball back, and then rap him on the head with it. Senior boys in the Mathematical School prepared to enter service in the navy by affecting disregard for fellow students, walking around the school and casually knocking over junior boys who got in the way; the calculated insolence, Hunt observed, ‘lay in the [older] boy not appearing to know that such inferior creatures existed’.18 Before his first three years were over Hunt had rebelled against the system, against bullies (or ‘brassers’), tyrannical monitors, and the odious expectation that juniors would act as a ‘fag’ for seniors. Being a fag meant making an older boy’s bed, cleaning his shoes, running for books, and so on. Other duties were just as servile, and one of them—standing in front of an open fire to screen the older boy from the heat—amounted to torture. Hunt also tells us how fagging involved demeaning entertainments, such as eating cakes adulterated with filth—‘the most disgusting humiliation [of] swallowing compounds that would sicken a ditch-reptile’. And there is more than a suggestion that—as in public schools—fags at Christ’s Hospital were required to supply sexual favours, enduring ‘the most degrading and disgusting labours, the most shameless and immodest insults’ and ‘unnatural amusements’.19

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Hunt’s opposition to this system of ‘wanton school tyranny’ caught the revolutionary spirit of the 1790s, and marked the beginning of his career as an enemy to oppression. In 1793–4, when he was 8 or 9 years old, a monitor tried to force him to fag—even though it was already known that Hunt would refuse. For the next two weeks, each evening, Hunt was taken out of his bed, stripped and beaten with a knotted handkerchief, until the handkerchief couldn’t be knotted any more. Hunt won this quarrel—and now he knew how his stance of independent, principled opposition could draw strength from a crowd (see Autobiography, I: pp. 93–4). Many of Hunt’s early confrontations, like this one, were on behalf of ‘a friend or a good cause’, evidence of the passionate idealism he brought to friendships—‘the most spiritual of the affections’—throughout his life.20 At Christ’s Hospital his closest friends were John Wood, a schoolboy poet, Frederick Papendieck, son of one of George III’s courtiers, Thomas Mitchell (who became a classical scholar) and Thomas Barnes (later editor of The Times). With Barnes and Mitchell he would skulk out of the cloisters to go swimming in the New River, bathing at Hammersmith or boating on the Thames (where Barnes toppled in while reading Seneca). Despite his sickliness Hunt seems to have joined vigorously in all of these outdoor antics and games—so much so that he gashed his face when he fell onto the school pump. With the pleasure of these adventures his Autobiography balances memories of the more rarefied ‘bliss’ that he felt in company with his particular friends: ‘I loved my friend for his gentleness…I thought him a kind of angel’.21 This preceded ‘any maturer feeling’, Hunt cautions us, and, certainly, there’s nothing in the Autobiography to rival the erotic tension of John Betjeman’s memories of Marlborough: Alone beside the fives-courts pacing, pacing, Waiting for God knows what. O stars above! My clothes clung tight to me, my heart was racing…22 Still, it’s clear that Hunt’s ‘delightful affection towards three successive schoolfellows’ and the ‘disembodied transport’ he experienced in their company was an idealised homosexual passion. The rapture and possessiveness persisted into later life, most obviously and lastingly so in relation to Shelley, whom Hunt was to make the focus of his intensely personal Christianism and, later, The Religion of the Heart. More immediately, as Hunt entered his teens he found that his powerful feelings for one of his schoolfellows gradually ‘became rivalled by a new set of emotions’ for his friend’s sister.23 Like his father, the adolescent Hunt would ‘dare anything’ for a friend, but he did so from a wish to demonstrate the ‘spirit of martyrdom’ which he associated with his mother. At Christ’s Hospital his dramatic intelligence was sharpened by arguments with masters and other boys, in which he courted and relished martyrdom: ‘I had a delight in being

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attacked’, he recalled!24 In years to come Hunt’s sense of performance would be a distinctive, controversial strength in his theatre criticism and poetry; he also cultivated his public persona as a champion of liberty who, in Keats’s words, embraced ‘the chain for Freedom’s sake’.25 When he looked back from old age, however, Hunt felt that he had been motivated by a disinterested passion—‘a feeling apart from my own sense of personal antagonism…something at stake which, by concerning others, gave me a sense of support, and so pieced out my want with their abundance’.26 The ability to ‘feel apart from [his] own sense’ would be crucial to Hunt’s literary and political careers. In his theatre criticism, for instance, Hunt was impressed by actors who seemed able to inhabit another personality, and mocked those whose performances showed no sense of dramatic identity, no ‘feeling apart’ from their own egos. And in the Examiner, Hunt’s declaration of ‘IMPARTIALITY’ was not just a stance of dogged isolation, but an endeavour—not always a successful one—to move beyond the personal so as to ‘look generally on mankind’.27 Hunt first rallied to ‘something at stake’ at Christ’s Hospital; some of this was no more than schoolboy bravado, no doubt, but he had also been taught by his parents to ‘speculate’ in politics and religion.28 He was grateful for visits to a synagogue that helped ‘universalize’ his spiritual ideas, and he was more responsive to tolerant ‘unbigoted’ religion than the ‘doctrine of eternal punishment’ he associated with Catholicism.29 His parents’ Unitarian and universalist opinions were an influence throughout Hunt’s time at the school, when the most pressing and controversial public issue was the French Revolution. ‘At that early period’, Hunt writes in a draft of his Autobiography, owing doubtless to what I heard at home, to the contradictions I already began to feel elsewhere, & perhaps in some degree to the tempest of the French Revolution… I unquestionably felt inclined to be an innovator; to redress wrongs; and reconcile discords…30 Just outside the gates of Christ’s Hospital was the teeming centre of the London book trade in Paternoster Row and St Paul’s Churchyard. The streets and alleys were packed with print shops and booksellers, from which flowed a torrent of pamphlets and broadsides about the French Revolution. His father’s pamphlet The Rights of Englishmen, Paine’s Rights of Man, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man and Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Godwin’s Political Justice all appeared in bookshops within yards of the school. Although Christ’s Hospital was religiously orthodox and high Tory in politics, it couldn’t remain isolated from the political storm raging beyond its ancient walls. At first Hunt repeated his father’s panegyrics about freedom fighters of the classical world, oblivious to the master’s irritation. But as the decade

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wore on, Hunt’s political consciousness gradually wakened, and he connected what he heard at home with the pamphlet debate about France, detecting the ‘free doctrines’ of classical literature and history in the ‘echo of them struck by the French Revolution’. 31 And right in front of him, experienced as a day-to-day actuality, were the petty tyrannies, slavery and violence of his own microcosm, Christ’s Hospital. More and more the school would appear to him as a source of wider injustice, ‘nothing but a system of alternate slavery and tyranny, fitted to make alternate slaves and tyrants in the political world; and the sordid encroachments upon the Constitution for the last hundred years never had a better friend from their cradle’.32 In Hunt’s analysis, the schoolboy bully becomes the ‘flourishing man of the world’, and his schoolboy fag tags along as his political fixer, private secretary, and ‘spin-doctor’: instead of carrying his master on his back, and eating cakes steeped in a gutter, he helps him through the dirt of politics, canvasses and votes at his bidding, or at best makes a servile bargain of what talent he may possess, screens every powerful delinquent, persecutes every powerless adversary, makes a private, perhaps a public, jest of enthusiasm, tramples in all that he can upon the community, is flourishing, scornful, hateful, shallow, and unhappy.33 The Examiner concluded that the system of ‘school tyranny’ was perpetuated ‘out in the world, such as we all have the misfortune to witness’. ‘The tyranny downwards always exists; the servility upwards is limited by hope and fear. The worst species of induced selfishness is the secret of both’.34 So Christ’s Hospital initiated and gave direction to Hunt’s political life, ensuring that from early schoolboy days his idealism was associated with classical civilisation and the tradition of English poetry. By turns bored and terrified in Boyer’s classes, there remained the thrill of delving into three forbidden books: Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, Tooke’s Pantheon and Spence’s Polymetis. All three were anthologies and reference books, the Pantheon being an especial favourite because it was illustrated with engravings of mythical figures like Mars and Apollo, and a naked Venus (‘very handsome, and not looking too modest’) which Hunt was ‘continually trying to copy’ because it reminded him of the nurse’s daughter. No doubt this book always opened at the same page. In Hunt’s poems classical myth would be entwined with adolescent sexual fantasies, erotic imaginings stirred by those forbidden engravings and by a glimpse of the ‘nymph’ who nurtured him in the sick ward ‘lifting her arms to tie/Her locks into a flowing knot’.35 Lemprière, Tooke and Spence were banned primarily because they were written in English, ‘so that nothing…might be out of the reach of the young scholar’s understanding’.36 This was scandalous because it meant that young scholars like Hunt and, later, Keats, who also enjoyed these

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books, could find out about classical literature and myth without the discipline of mastering the original languages (at Shelley’s Eton, by contrast, the ‘Eton Latin Grammar’ was written in Latin; ancient Greek was learned after Latin, and the Greek grammars were written in Latin as well). The Classical Dictionary, Pantheon and Polymetis were suspect for making high culture available in vernacular English, giving anyone who could read ‘access’ to knowledge which had hitherto been the preserve of an aristocratic élite. This was a revolutionary innovation, comparable to the storming of the Bastille: an exclusive educational system, with the social and political establishments it served, was threatened by a more democratic academy. When Hunt tired of his Latin grammar and turned to Lemprière or Tooke, he was at liberty to imagine and enjoy the classics as never before, and that sense of delight and release remained with him. In later years he would write poems in that spirit, knowingly combining classical subjects with erotic themes and liberal ideals, and the response of the critics echoed Boyer’s rage on discovering that Hunt had a copy of the Pantheon open under his desk. Lemprière and the others let Hunt dream of being elsewhere, beyond the schoolrooms and the ward, and in this way too the English poets were ‘a never-ceasing consolation’. The association of poetry and freedom stayed with him, and in his journalism Hunt often recruited the English poets Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton as liberal heroes, persuaded that their imaginative genius had never been tainted by the ‘induced selfishness’ of the public school system. When he arrived at Christ’s Hospital in 1791 he had already tasted the Arabian Nights and poetry by Cowper, Collins, Goldsmith, Gray and Johnson. James Thomson’s Seasons, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and (more recently) Elizabeth Inchbald’s novel A Simple Story were admired by his mother and enjoyed by Hunt. The first publication of Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Select Poets was a red-letter day. This was in 1794, when Hunt was almost 10 years old: ‘How I loved those little sixpenny numbers containing whole poets!…I bought them over and over again’.37 Out of school hours he relished Spenser, Collins and Gray, and he subscribed to the Minerva Library in nearby Leadenhall Street for he was an insatiable ‘glutton of novels’.38 Now that he was separated from his family, books and poems he could ‘doat’ on became a kind of ‘select’ company. They could draw to him the attention and affection his parents had once given him, and were a temptation overcoming all scruples because they were associated with self-nurturing and the desire to please others. In a draft that wasn’t included in the published Autobiography, Hunt recalls that as a schoolboy he impulsively gave away a book which didn’t belong to him; I made a present of it’, he writes, ‘the wish to give was irresistible; & I gave’. When the rightful owner of the book loudly accused him of theft, Hunt was ‘ashamed; very sorry; very full of remorse’. But the school-fellow’s complaints became excessive and scornful, bringing other boys who sided

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‘with the offender’, ‘roused’ his self-respect, and made him feel in the right. Looking back, Hunt saw that this had been ‘an ill & dangerous process’. It had shown that he could expect others to be generous and forgiving with no reciprocal obligation on his part. He was beyond reproach: ‘I left the schoolroom that morning with a particular air of self-resumption, putting on my gloves at the door, & cherishing a book under my arm, as if nothing had happened’. 39 Here, in a Christ’s Hospital anecdote, was a pattern of behaviour that persisted for the rest of Hunt’s life. As an adult Hunt often regarded others’ money and property as so much sustenance for him, rightfully at his disposal, like the books he handed round for all to enjoy. As Hunt progressed through the school other writers came into view: Pope (‘admired more than loved’), Fielding, Richardson and Smollett, Mallett’s Northern Antiquities, The Wonderful Magazine’, Augustus La Fontaine and, as a school exercise, The Spectator. Hamlet was the only Shakespeare he read at this time, and he plunged through Hudibras as ‘a sort of achievement’ when a scald confined him once again to the sick ward. By 1794 Hunt was writing his own poetry. His first poem honoured the Duke of York’s victory at Dunkirk in July 1794—and, having written it, he was mortified to discover that he’d been misinformed, for the skirmish at Dunkirk was one more defeat in the rout of British troops on the continent. A more promising topic was a poem, Winter, in imitation of Thomson’s Seasons, an old favourite he had enjoyed for as long as he could remember. At 12 years old, in 1796, he wrote ‘Macbeth; or, The Ill Effects of Ambition’, a melodramatic lyric of ‘struggling passions’ and ‘fierce desire’. He followed this with one hundred verses of a poem called the Fairy King, which imitated Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and a long poem, Thor, which he composed in Latin. Of these ambitious efforts only ‘Macbeth’ would see publication: it stands first in Juvenilia. In September 1798 Coleridge published ‘Frost at Midnight’ in his Fears in Solitude pamphlet, and Hunt was among the first to read this when it appeared at Joseph Johnson’s bookshop in St Paul’s Churchyard, five minutes’ walk from the school. The experience of reading the poem was one of immediate recognition. Coleridge’s yearning for companionship and for home were Hunt’s own feelings; ‘the stern preceptor’s face’ brought before him Boyer’s cruel eyes, and the wonderful lines where Coleridge remembered how he was reared In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars40 spoke so powerfully to Hunt that he began to think of a poem of his own that might emulate what Coleridge had done. This wasn’t the poem that became ‘Christ’s Hospital’ (which was in some respects indebted to Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton

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College’) but a fresh composition, ‘Remembered Friendship’. Hunt wrote of his most deeply felt experiences at the school; of his friendships, his delight in classical mythology, and moments that might rival ‘Frost at Midnight’, when, for a while, before the gentle sweets Of sleep had clos’d our eyes, how oft we lay Admiring thro’ the casement open’d wide The spangled glories of the sky…41 Among the glories of the sky was the moon ‘bursting forth’ from clouds, which Hunt likened to ‘love resistless’ and the birth of Venus: ‘So Cytherea from the frothy wave/Rose in luxuriant beauty’. Hunt’s vision of Venus under London skies, rising from the pages of Lemprière and Tooke’s Pantheon, proved a blessing for another poet. Years later, the lines about the ‘casement open’d wide’ from Hunt’s poem ‘Remembered Friendship’ may have helped Keats to the conclusion of his ‘Ode to Psyche’ A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in!42 Keats’s legend of Cupid and Psyche has been linked with his idea of the world as a ‘vale of Soul-making’, figurative representations from ‘hethen mythology’ of the ‘proovings of [the] heart’ which go to the making of a soul.43 Keats, like Hunt, knew from Lemprière how the nymph Psyche had been put to death by Venus because she had robbed the world of her son Cupid; whereupon Jupiter at the request of Cupid granted immortality to Psyche, who became Keats’s ‘hethen Goddess’, cloistered in ‘some untrodden region of [his] mind’ and ready to welcome ‘warm Love in!’ This scene, elaborating the Christ’s Hospital prospect from Hunt’s ‘casement open’d wide’, is usually related to Keats’s feelings for Fanny Brawne, for in suburban Wentworth Place ‘he would have been able to see her lighted window next door.44 As Elizabeth Jones shows in her essay (see p. 87), Keats’s vow, A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same…45 presents Psyche’s bower in terms drawn from the suburban gardenesque. They also seem to resemble Hunt’s recollections of his prison cell, ‘papered…with a trellis of roses’ and his garden ‘adorned with a trellis’ and ‘filled with flowers’ (Autobiography, II: pp. 148–9).46 Keats’s myth of soul-making

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in ‘Ode to Psyche’ apparently stands behind Hunt’s accounts of his prison ordeal. And it’s possible, too, that the ‘rosy sanctuary’ of Keats’s poem had actually been suggested by Hunt’s ‘heart-prooving’ in prison, and by what he had heard of Hunt’s transformation of an oppressive scene into one of imaginative, erotic possibility: ‘a casement ope at night,/To let the warm Love in!’. It was from prison, 31 May 1813, that Hunt had written to his wife Marianne: The little garden looks delightful, I was going to say perfectly finished, but you are not in it when I am there, & in that case the completest thing is deficient’. And then, anticipating her presence, like Venus breaking from the clouds, Hunt added, ‘the roses…will be looking forth to meet you; so will the pinks; & there are some other colours which you may imagine, that will glow with tenfold warmth when you approach’.47

Notes 1 Juvenilia, p. 20. 2 The Works of Charles Lamb, ed. E.V.Lucas (7 vols, London: Methuen, 1903–4), II: p. 21, hereafter Lamb, Works; Autobiography, I: pp. 98–9. 3 Autobiography, I: p. 98; BLJ, VI: p. 46. 4 Autobiography, I: pp. 96, 101. 5 Autobiography, I: pp. 176–8; The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 3 vols, each in 2 parts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957–73), II: 2055, hereafter STCNB. 6 STCNB, I: 1726. 7 Autobiography, I: p. 102. 8 Autobiography, Earliest Sketches, p. 27. 9 See Autobiography, I: pp. 105–6; CL, I: p. 389; Lamb, ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’, Lamb, Works, II: pp. 12–13, 15. 10 Autobiography, I: pp. 107–9. 11 Autobiography, Earliest Sketches, p. 32. 12 Autobiography, I: p. 141. 13 Autobiography, I: pp. 111–15. 14 Autobiography, I: p. 116; Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W.J. Bate, CC 7, (2 vols, Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Routledge, 1983), I: p. 11. 15 Autobiography, I: pp. 128–9. 16 Autobiography, I: pp. 116–18; 120–5; 143. James Gillman, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1838), p. 20. 17 Autobiography, I: p. 117. 18 Autobiography, Earliest Sketches, pp. 23–4; Autobiography, I: pp. 92, 113–14. 19 Autobiography, I: pp. 93–4; E (17 May 1818), p. 306; E (31 May 1818), p. 338. 20 Autobiography, I: p. 143. 21 Autobiography, I: p. 144. 22 John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells (London: John Murray, 1960), p. 72. 23 Autobiography, I: pp. 144–5. 24 Autobiography, Earliest Sketches, p. 27.

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25 E (31 May 1818), p. 337; Autobiography, I: pp. 91–4; Keats, To Charles Cowden Clarke’, 44, PJK, p. 61. ‘Great spirits now on earth are sojourning’, 6, PJK, p. 67. 26 Autobiography, I: p. 91. 27 E (3 January 1808), p. 7, and ‘Preface’ to vol. 1 of E. 28 E (17 May 1818), p. 305. 29 Autobiography, I: pp. 172–4. 30 Autobiography, Earliest Sketches, p. 29. 31 Autobiography, I: p. 135. 32 E (17 May 1818), p. 306. 33 E (24 May 1818), p. 322. 34 E (7 June 1818), p. 353. 35 ‘The Nymphs’ from Foliage. 36 Autobiography, I: p. 131; Andrew Tooke, The Pantheon (London, 1783), pp. iii– iv. 37 Autobiography, I: p. 133. 38 Autobiography, I: p. 260. 39 Autobiography, Earliest Sketches, pp. 21–2. 40 Quoted from S.T.Coleridge. Poems, ed. John Beer (London: Everyman, 1999). 41 ‘Remembered Friendship’, quoted from Juvenilia, pp. 25–30. 42 PJK, p. 366. 43 See LJK, II: pp. 102–4, letter to the George Keatses, 14 February–3 May 1819. In this journal letter Keats’s account of ‘Soul-making’ comes shortly before he transcribes the Ode to Psyche. 44 See The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), p. 521. 45 PJK, p. 366. 46 Hunt had also described his decorated cell in one of his Wishing-Cap essays for the Examiner, March–October 1824. 47 Letter to Marianne Hunt, 31 May 1813, Gates, p. 46.

3

Leigh Hunt and Charles Cowden Clarke, 1812–18 John Barnard

The relationship between Leigh Hunt, Charles Cowden Clarke and John Keats was formative. Clarke had been Keats’s teacher and he was an important friend 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. This was also the time when Clarke visited Hunt in Horsemonger Lane gaol, and it was Clarke who later introduced Keats to 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 Leigh Hunt and his circle between 1812 and 1818, and Charles Cowden Clarke’s place among his friends. 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 Dove Cottage exhibition in summer 1995. However, additional material in the collection gives further information about Clarke’s childhood, his early acquaintance with Charles Ollier 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 lifelong correspondence between Hunt and Clarke gives details of the two men’s relationship during Keats’s life. Full or partial texts of many of these letters were published in Recollections.2 Of the original sequence of sixteen numbered letters, five are now missing though texts of two of these are printed in Recollections. Six of the letters are unpublished. (There is also an additional unpublished letter in the University of Iowa, from Clarke to Hunt dated 28 April 1814, which was clearly no longer in Clarke’s hands when he prepared his published account of Keats. This is included here for the sake of completeness.) The full texts of these letters give fresh details of the relationship between Hunt and Clarke, identify Clarke as the author of a rare pamphlet published in

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1816 defending Hunt’s The Story of Rimini (Clarke’s own annotated copy is in the collection) and show the two older men’s critical attitude in July 1817 towards Keats’s behaviour and character. They also further illustrate the importance of music in the Hunt circle, though the advice Hunt gave on 2 November 1814 suggests that Clarke had only recently discovered Mozart. A fuller account of Clarke’s sensibility and literary ambitions emerges from the exchanges with Hunt, revealing the assiduity with which Clarke pursued Hunt’s favour as well as Hunt’s remarkable qualities as a letter writer and friend. Before giving transcripts of the Clarke-Hunt correspondence and selections from Clarke’s pamphlet, two less important items, which give evidence about Clarke’s childhood and about Charles Ollier, will be considered. First, there is a copy of Recollections of Writers (1878) owned by Mary Cowden Clarke in which passages, apparently omitted by the publisher,3 have been neatly pasted in on slips. Among these slips is one pasted opposite page 5 with a new beginning for the sentence which starts, ‘My father was intimate with the celebrated Roman Catholic writer, Dr. Alexander Geddes’; the insertion reads: My father’s liberality of opinion was of the most exemplary character. Every Sectarian whom he believed, from familiar intercourse, to be tolerant as well as sincere, he received with cordiality, and canvassed their opinions with bland and cheerful candour. He was intimate &c. Lower down on the same page a clause is added to the end of Clarke’s remarks on his father’s friendship with Gilbert Wakefield, translator of the New Testament, and the surgeon, John Mason—‘these men had my father’s eager correspondence and admiration’. There is also a sentence at the beginning of the first paragraph on page 6: My Father not only took me himself to see his distinguished acquaintances, but he favoured my making my own early friendships and fostered my cultivating an intimacy with such superior men as our own village neighbourhood supplied. I was but a mere child &c. These omitted comments further emphasise John Clarke’s liberal and openminded qualities, which are well-attested by other sources. On the same page the publisher made another omission after Clarke described his own ‘long, light-brown curls reaching below the shoulders’, no doubt to save Clarke from appearing effeminate to his mid-Victorian readers: these same curls, by the way, being the occasion of a hoot from the boys of the Westminster School when my Father chanced to be leading me through the quadrangle belonging to those precincts during one of our visits to London; and we had the satisfaction of hearing the comment on

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my girlish appearance thus unceremoniously expressed:—‘Oh, my eye! What a quiz! I say, do look at that Miss Molly!’ The second item is a letter preserved in the collection which shows that by 1812 Clarke had met Charles Ollier, who was to publish Hunt and Shelley as well as Keats’s first volume. Clarke wrote to Ollier, dating his letter ‘Enfield 1812.’ It begins with a list of mottoes from Virgil and the Phaedrus, accompanied by translations, which Ollier had requested. Clarke goes on, rather archly, to ‘submit to the firy [sic] ordeal of your criticism, a little piece of my own translation from that great; that exquisite Poet—Virgil!’ Clarke then excuses his work since it was ‘written when I was a boy, when I knew much less of poetry than I do now’. The translation is from Virgil’s description of the night in the Aeneid (IV: 522–32). It is prefaced by an example of Clarke’s literary criticism: There is something to me wonderfully artful and pathetic in the poet’s introducing the magic stillness of a silent summer’s Night, with all nature at rest—all animated creation receiving the benefit of refreshing sleep; by way of contrast to the tumultuous and stormy mind of poor Dido who is driven at random through jealousy, rage and despair!—Oh! if you could relish the original! Clarke’s enthusiasm, coupled with close analysis, must reflect the way in which he discussed Virgil and other poets with Keats, first as a teacher and later as a friend. The letter also shows Clarke’s own sense of his classical attainments, in which he felt himself superior not only to Ollier but also to Keats. The letter concludes by inviting Ollier to Enfield for New Year’s Eve celebrations along with ‘the two Gat[t]ies, viz John and Frederick; Powell, yourself, & H.Robertson’. Clarke later said that he first met Leigh Hunt in this group of friends: The company among which I frequently encountered [Hunt] were covisitors of no small merit. Henry Robertson—one of the most delightful of associates for good temper, good spirits, good taste in all things literary and artistic; the brothers Gattie—Frederick, William, Henry, and John Byng Gattie, whose agreeable tenor voice is commemorated in Hunt’s sonnet addressed to two of the men now under mention… Charles Ollier…and Tom Richards….4 Henry Robertson—the brother of John Robertson who introduced Hunt to his future wife, Mary Anne Kent—had been involved in the management of Covent Garden Theatre since giving up reviewing opera for the Examiner in 1813: he had a good voice and had visited Hunt in prison.5 Oilier had been employed at Courts Bank when he met Leigh Hunt in 1810 in the Examiners office, offering the editor an example of his theatrical criticism.6 By 1816

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Ollier and his brother, John, had set up as publishers, but if the pencilled note in Clarke’s commonplace book (p. 272) is correct, he was a ‘Box Keeper’ in Covent Garden Theatre in August 1813. The tone and content of Clarke’s letter of 28 October 1812 suggest that he had only recently made Ollier’s acquaintance. Cowden Clarke was to become a lifelong friend of Leigh Hunt’s. The Novello-Cowden Clarke Collection has a long run of Hunt’s letters to Clarke beginning in 1814 and extending into the 1850s. When Clarke came to prepare the chapter entitled ‘Leigh Hunt and his Letters’ for Recollections of Writers, he chose to publish only a selection of Hunt’s letters to himself covering the years 1813 to 1818. The holograph letters now in the NovelloCowden Clarke Collection were evidently prepared for publication since they have been numbered in red pencil at the top. In the case of those which appeared in Recollections, passages to be printed are marked by square brackets. There were once sixteen letters covering this period, three of which are no longer available in either a printed or manuscript version. Of the sixteen, Clarke printed all or part of seven letters. Two of the letters Clarke chose to print are no longer preserved with the letters now in the collection. Clarke’s editing of Hunt’s letters shows a fairly consistent pattern. He excises virtually all of the passages about his and Hunt’s various illnesses and attacks of nervousness which sound strikingly valetudinarian in an exchange between two young men in their mid-twenties. The aim may be less to edit out hypochondria than cut out unpleasantness. The latter motive certainly explains Clarke’s excision of Hunt’s criticism of Keats on 1 July 1817. Clarke also focuses attention away from himself, deleting Hunt’s advice to him about Mozart, Hunt’s comments on Clarke’s defence of The Story of Rimini, and most of the details of the way Hunt involved Clarke in the printing of the latter work. The full text of this sequence of letters makes it clear that Clarke was a more touchy, difficult and moody man than is evident from his self-portrait in 1878, and also that the Cowden Clarkes’ later interpretation of Hunt’s letter of December 1818 completely disguises the irritation of the Examiners editor with Clarke’s persistent efforts to win his favour. The full texts of all the extant letters are printed here. Square brackets denote editorial material; large square brackets in bold type indicate the passages to be published in Recollections of Writers adding concluding brackets where Clarke failed to mark them in manuscript. Where sections of the correspondence are missing, the letters necessary to complete the sequence have been supplied from Recollections. The initial numbers in bold type are those pencilled on the manuscripts by Clarke.

*** [1] No copy of Hunt’s letter of 13 July 1813 survives. Text here from Recollections, p. 191.

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To Mr. C.C.Clarke. Surrey Jail, Tuesday, July 13th, 1813. DEAR SIR,—I shall be truly happy to see yourself and your friend to dinner next Thursday, and can answer for the mutton, if not the ‘cordials’ of which you speak. However, when you and I are together there can be no want, I trust, of cordial hearts, and those are much better. Remember, we dine at three! Mrs. Hunt begs her respects, but will hear of no introduction, as she has reckoned you an old acquaintance ever since you made your appearance before us by proxy in a basket.—Very sincerely yours, LEIGH HUNT. [As Clarke remarks in Recollections, p. 191, the letter belongs ‘to the “Dear Sir” stage of addressing each other’; Hunt is referring to ‘the basket of fresh flowers, fruit, and vegetables sent weekly from the garden at Enfield’ by Clarke and his father.] 2. Extracted in Recollections, pp. 191–2. Text here from manuscript, see Figure 2; addressed, ‘Mr Charles Cowden Clarke, /Enfield.’; postmark, ‘7 o’Clock JA. 9. 1814. NT.’. Surrey Jail—Jan. 5. 1814. Dear Sir, I am much oblig’d to you for your letter, & am happy to tell you that just now I am at my very best, though the fogs of last week had well nigh reduced me to my worst. My brother says, that it was the worst week he had yet had, bringing upon him a continued headache; & a head-ache with him is no trifle, I know, or he would not mention it:—it is a sick bilious one. I had a note from him yesterday however, in which he represented himself as another man since the change of the weather. Your own letter, by the way, I should have acknowledged sooner, but the servant in emptying your basket neglected to bring out the book that contained it, & it did not come into my hands till this morning. The book I have read before, but thank you for it, & shall be glad to look over it again. It is a good thing altogether, & though not profound, full of good sense & written in a nice, unaffected style. Lord Holland is a good fellow, & has some of the best elements about him of his uncle Charles Fox.7 [The last time I saw your friend Powell,8 he put into my hands a letter he had received from your father at the time of our going to prison,—a letter full of kindness and cordiality. Pray will you give my respects to Clarke, & tell him that had I been aware of his good wishes towards my brother & myself, I should have been anxious to say so before this; but I know the differences of opinion that sometimes exist in families, & something like a

Hunt and Charles Cowden Clarke, 1812–18

Figure

37

2 Letter from Leigh Hunt to Charles Cowden Clarke, dated ‘SurreyJail—Jan. 5. 1814’. Reproduced with the permission of the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library.

feeling to that effect kept me silent. I should quarrel with this rogue Powell about it if, in the first place, I could afford to quarrel with any body, & if I did not believe him to be one of the best-natured men in the world. Should your father be coming this way, I hope he will do me the pleasure of looking in. I should have sent to yourself some weeks ago, or

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at least before this, to come & see how we enjoy your vegetables, only I was afraid, that like most people at this season of the year, you might be involved in a round of family engagements with aunts, cousins, & secondcousins, & all the list at the end of the prayer-book. As soon as you can snatch a little leisure, pray let us see you. You know our dinner-hour, & can hardly have to learn, at this time of day, how sincerely I am, My dear Sir, Your friend & servant, Leigh Hunt.] Additional letter. The text here is from the manuscript in the Brewer Collection at the University of Iowa, by permission of the University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa /favoured by Richards.’ Richards was City).9 Addressed ‘Leigh Hunt most likely Thomas Richards rather than his brother Charles, see note 54; no postmark. Enfield, 28th April 1814 Dear Sir, The enclosed paper of Holt White10 (whom you have heard me mention) desired me to give to you; he said perhaps it might suit your plan to insert it in the Examiner, now that institutions for the education of the poor are so rife.//11 Do not consider me importunate but I should be happy to hear from you, if it be but a statement of your health.// I suppose I need not ask you if you have heard of the new candidate for the title of Junius,— Glover,—the Author of Leonidas?12 according to my shallow judgement in such cases, he has a stronger claim to the title than any one who has yet been proposed. A number of collateral circumstances in the little political memoir of himself, and now edited by Duppa,13 bear apparently an unintentional evidence to his being the Man. His mode of giving degrading epithets to those whom he hated are quite in Junius’s manner. His respect for the talents and general character of Lord Chatham;14 with the decorous enmity which he bears him on account of some points in his character, may be very fairly adduced as bearing upon the points. But how I am running on! I forget that I take it for granted that you have seen the book—I have just closed it, and am warm in the business, therefore you I know will excuse me. I will take up no more of your time, so impertinently, than to assure you once more that I am Dear Sir with every sentiment of respect Your friend Charles Cowden Clarke Leigh Hunt My respects if you please to Mrs Hunt

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3. Extracted in Recollections, p. 192. Text here from manuscript; addressed, ‘ Charles Cowden Clarke, /Enfield.’; postmark, ‘7 o’clock. MY. 17. 1814. NT’. Clarke omits all but the last line of the first page. Surrey Jail—

May 1814.

My dear Sir, I am utterly ashamed to have delayed writing to you day after day, but you have been amply revenged by the many twinges of conscience it has occasioned me. I have indeed been very unwell, & on the occasion you mention was unable to write for the paper; but I am now, I believe, in a fair way to be proportionably better, being able, at last, after this horrid winter & pertinacious east-wind, to get out & walk before breakfast.—It strikes me as it does yourself respecting Glover,—with one exception, & that I fear, or rather hope, is convincing against the supposition;—it is this, that Glover appears to have been a truly nobleminded man, both in his private & public conduct, & to have really been influenced by all that he professes; whereas the more I read of Junius (since this edition of him by Woodfall15) the more it shocks me to discover petty views, double dealings, & an abundance of the most despicable malignity. It is more than mortifying to come to such conclusions respecting a writer, who has unquestionably exhibited a great deal of talent & even done a considerable deal of good; but such is the character I shall think myself bound to call him someday or other, when I can find courage to enter upon my promised review of him.—[I am much obliged to Mr. Holt White for his communication. Your new laid eggs were exceedingly welcome to me at the time they came, as I had just then begun once more to try an egg every morning; but I have been obliged to give it up.—Perhaps I shall please you by telling you that I am writing a Mask16 in allusion to the late events. It will go to press, I hope, in the course of next week, & this must be one of my excuses both for having delayed the letter before me, & for now abruptly concluding it. I shall beg the favour of your accepting a copy, when it comes out,—as I should have done with my last little publication,17 except for a resolution to which some of my most intimate friends had come for a particular reason, & which induced me to regard you as one of those to whom I could pay the compliment of not sending a copy. This reason is now no longer in force, & therefore you will oblige me by waiting to hear from myself instead of your bookseller. Yours, my dear Sir, Most sincerely, Leigh Hunt.] 4. Extracted in Recollections, pp. 192–3. Text from manuscript; addressed, ‘ Charles Cowden Clarke,/ Enfield.’; postmark, ‘4 o’clock. NO.3. 1814.

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EV’. Clarke omits the last part of the letter and makes the postscript part of the text: [Surrey Jail—

Nov. 1814.

My Dear Sir, I hope you have not been accusing your friends Ollier & Robertson of forgetting you,—or at least, thinking so—for all the fault is at my own door. The truth is, that when I received your request relative to the songs of Mozart, I had resolved to answer it myself, & did not say a word on the subject to either one or the other; so that I am afraid I have been hindring two good things—your own enjoyment of the songs, & an opportunity on the part of O[llier] & R[obertson] of shewing you that they were readier correspondents than myself. After all perhaps, a little of the fault is attributable to yourself, for how can you expect that a man rolling in hebdomadal luxuries,—pears, apples, and fig—should think of any thing?— By the way, now I am speaking of luxuries, let me thank you for your very acceptable present of apples to my brother John. If you had ransacked the garden of the Hesperides, you could not have made him, I am sure, a more welcome one. I believe his notion of the highest point of the sensual in eating is an apple, hard juicy, & fresh.] But to return to the songs. The most beautiful ones, at least with which I am acquainted, appear to me to be as follows:—18 crudel Perchè finora—a duett—a piece of wonderful passion, mixed [one or more lines cut out with scissors at bottom of page] Del prendi un dolce amplesso—duett Voi che sapete—song Non so più cosa son—D.° La ci darem la mano—a delicious mixture of refinement & artless feeling Secondate, aurette amiche—duett Su l’aria—D.°—the perfection of a lightsome enjoyment La mia Dorabella—trio These are the best I can immediately recollect. The last is very ardent and beautiful; & indeed it is an injustice to the rest to characterise any in particular. Perhaps however I have omitted some now; indeed I am sure I must, when I recollect all that he has written; but I shall see O[llier] & R[obertson] this evening, who know more of music than I do, & will speak to them on the subject. There is a friend of mine also,19 who has all the principal operas of Mozart from Germany, & perhaps he may not only point out some to me which I have at present forgotten, but may enable you, if you wish it, to copy out any particular one which you cannot procure in the shops, for I believe they are far from all printed in a

Hunt and Charles Cowden Clarke, 1812–18

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separate form. The next time you do me the pleasure of panegyrizing Hunt’s tea, I will shew you what few I have got. Of Ah perdona & Del prende I happen to have duplicates, so as a specimen of my generosity, you must do me the favour of accepting them.— Pray make my compliments to May,20 & [rest of line cut out with scissors] [P.S. The printers have got about half through with my Mask. You will be pleased to hear that I have been better for some days than ever I have felt during my imprisonment,—& in spite too of rains and east winds.] 5. Unpublished. Text from manuscript; addressed,‘ no postmark:

C.C.Clarke, / Enfield.’;

Surrey Jail—16. Dec. 1814. My dear Sir, I happen to be in the hurry of my Examiner business just now, & have only time to say that I send you, at last, a copy of the Mask which I have procured of the printer21 before publication. They have not yet been put into boards yet, & are in fact waiting for arrangement with another bookseller22 before they come out. You will therefore be kind enough to keep the book as much to yourself & your particular friend or two as possible; & when it is published, I shall beg you to return it to me in order that it may have its proper title page like the rest.—I am much better in health again, & need not say, how happy we shall be to see you act the morning-star,+some fine evening, with your friend ‘May’ in your hand. Ever sincerely your’s, Leigh Hunt. + See Milton.23 6. Printed in Recollections, pp. 193–4. Text here from manuscript; addressed, ‘To/ C.C.Clarke/Enfield’; no postmark. The letter is kept with Hunt’s gift copy of The Descent of Liberty (1815), which has a red binding, with gilding, and is inscribed on the half-title, ‘To/Charles Cowden Clarke,/with the Author’s best remembrances’. [Vale of Health—Hampstead Tuesday 7. Nov. 1815. My dear Sir, You have left a picture for me, I understand, at Paddington, where the rogues are savagely with holding it from me. I shall have it, I suppose, in the course of the day, & conjecture that it to be some poet’s or

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politician’s head you have picked up in turning over some old engravings. I beg you to laugh very heartily, by the bye, if I am anticipating a present, where there is none. I am apt, from old remembrances, to fall into this extravagance respecting the Enfield quarter, & do it with the less scruple, inasmuch as you are obliging enough to consult my taste in this particular,—which is, small gifts from large hearts.—I am glad however in the present instance that I have been made to wait a little, since it enables me, for once, to be beforehand with you, & I can at last send you your long promised books.24 The binder, notwithstanding my particular injunctions, & not having seen, I suppose, the colour of the fields lately enough to remember it, has made the covers red instead of green. You must fancy the books are blushing for having been so long before they came to you. Your’s most sincerely, Leigh Hunt.] To/ C.C.Clarke/Enfield. 7. Unpublished. Text here from manuscript; addressed, ‘To/ C.C. Clarke,/ to the care of Mr. Hunter,/ Pauls’ Church-Yard./74.’; no postmark. Mr. Hunter was Rowland Hunter, Leigh Hunt’s step-father-in-law, who succeeded Joseph Johnson at the famous bookshop in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Hampstead—July 10. 1816. My dear Sir, I can have no objection to the publication of the work in question,25 on its own grounds:—it is very flattering to me, and very well written,— though perhaps it might be as well to alter a phrase or two of overgravity, such as ‘surprisingly offensive’.26 There are some sentences in particular, not only exceedingly well turned in point of composition, but very pregnant & fisty-cuffish. (A pretty sample here of consistent metaphor.) The only doubts I should have with regard to the publication, are whether, in the first place, it would not be supposed that I had taken some steps in it myself,—& secondly, whether, in short, a reply involving so much seriousness would not be doing the critic too much honour, & implying that he had really said any thing at all of his own,—which you know he has not done.— But all this I leave, literally, to your judgment. Your own head is quite enough to settle it; & I should add your own heart, if I did not think that might be likely to beg the question at once in favour of Your very obliged & hearty friend, Leigh Hunt.

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P.S. I must beg your pardon for not being quick enough for Hunter this morning. One other nap undid me. But I hope the coach will have been beforehand with you in Paul’s Church —By the bye, I was not at the play myself. —When will you come and eat gooseberries with me? Perhaps if this is in time, you will be with us today at 3? I expect Hazlitt.—I sympathized, as you will easily guess, with your bile. Indeed I was so unwell myself yesterday, from some cause or other, that in going to town upon business, I was fairly obliged to turn back just as I had got to Tottenham Court Road. But I am a great deal better now.—I hope you are inexorable with regard to butter & salmon, (a great enemy of mine) & that you particularly give the pastry-cook shops the go-by. To/

C.C.Clarke.

[The Novello Clarke Collection has a copy of an anonymous pamphlet entitled An Address to that Quarterly Reviewer who Touched upon Mr. Leigh Hunt’s ‘Story of Rimini’ (1816). It is a duodecimo made up of a single sheet, printed by C.Richards for R.Jennings, 2 The Poultry. Its title page announces that it is to ‘be had of all Booksellers in Town or Country’ at a price of one shilling. The work is undoubtedly that referred to by Hunt. Towards the end Clarke says that The Quarterly ‘has in several instances been surprisingly offensive’ (pp. 20–1, my italics), and there are pencilled corrections in what looks like Clarke’s hand. It is a rare pamphlet: The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue records a single copy at Harvard, though not under Clarke’s name. Hunt had been attacked in the January 1816 issue of The Quarterly Review (pp. 473–81). Clarke’s pamphlet is alert to the political dimensions of the reviewer’s attack on Hunt’s diction: You object to the epithet ‘clipsome’ as being applied to a lady’s waist [The Story of Rimini, i. 122]; and because, truly, it is not to be found in any vernacular tongue! Such a reason could be expected only from a writer in an anti-reformist Review. Can anyone reasonably hesitate at the import of the word? (p. 8) Clarke not surprisingly objects to the reviewer’s attack on Hunt because he had been imprisoned. But in view of the charges of sexual impurity levelled at Hunt’s poem, Clarke’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Romantic distinction between a work’s aesthetic value and its author’s personal morality leads him to choose some dangerous examples: suppose Mr. Hunt had retained his quondam mistress as waiting woman to his wife;—suppose he were a gambler, and adulterer, or a debauchee — one or all three of these characters,—suppose he had been a horse-jockey

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who had drugged his horse, that he might be the gainer by that animal’s failure;—what would all this have to do with merits, or demerits, of his poem? (p. 11) Towards the end of the pamphlet Clarke attempts to give an account of the ‘influence of Reviews in general’ and of their symbiotic relationship with booksellers (pp. 18ff.): Literature (alack the while!) has its middle men as well as the more ordinary concerns of life; the prosecution of whose interest is alike pernicious to the caterers, and the consumers of intellectual food. While the soi-disant guardians of public taste, morals, and politics [that is, critics], arrogate a prescriptive right to all the genius, commonsense, and learning of the nation; the esprit du corps of booksellers has established a line of circumvallation from the pale of which the unfortunate votary of the muses in vain endeavours to escape. The former hydra-like monsters [critics] stalk the earth, enchaining in their ‘beastly thrall’ the minds of indolent men [the reading public]; the latter [booksellers] battening on the genius of their best friends, the men of genius, like harpies, blow upon, and taint, what they do not devour. (pp. 18–19) Clarke believed that the reviewers were specifically biased against ‘contemporary work’— Upon some occasions the world has certainly lately been indebted to Reviews, for essays which would have embellished any period of our literary history—si sic omnes!—When a contemporary work crosses you, in which the public religion, or politics, or even taste is implicated, we find that those who assume the dictation and government of others, are the tools of booksellers, the slaves of passion, prejudice and party…. (pp. 19–20) Clarke clearly means by ‘contemporary works’ those, which like Hunt’s poem, pose a challenge to orthodox moral, political, or aesthetic values. Consequently: So far from diffusing a wholesome spirit through the world of letters—so far from guarding its privileges,—Reviews form a sort of nucleus, round which the venom of every noxious creature is collected ready for circulation:—a sanctuary for the bravos of literature; whence they issue forth muffled, and ‘kill men i’ the dark!’ (p. 20)

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The pamphlet concludes in Clarke’s best ‘fisty-cuffish’ style: This reminds me of the purport of my ‘word for myself’, which was to make apology—if it will be taken—for the rudeness of this address: though an impression may be made on some men with an horse-whip, others are to be attacked only with a crow-bar! (p. 24) Clarke’s analysis in An Address of the business of publishing and the politics of reviewing was no doubt one common in Hunt’s and liberal circles. Charles and John Ollier’s decision to set up as publishers in the same year suggests that they shared the ‘manly’ and aggressive idealism of Clarke’s pamphlet.] 8. Unpublished. Text from manuscript; addressed, ‘ Towers’s,/Little Warner Street,/Clerkenwell.’; no postmark.

C.C.Clarke,/

Hampstead Oct. 17. 1816. My dear Sir, I write at a moment when I can do little but regret that I cannot write more. Whenever you get into a notion, [bal crossed out] bilis gratiâ, that I have a notion in the remotest degree offended, or piqued, or any else with you, be assured you are fancying an impossibility. I would interchange kind offices with you as I would thoughts with myself, or as a physician would put his own fee out of one hand into the other. Imagine therefore what I really felt at the sight of your copy books.27 I hope to stock them all with poetry such you will relish, & then I know that I shall be turning them to such account as both you & myself like best. I intended to have written, but I expected you on Sunday, then on Monday, then on Tuesday, & then comes in my old vile delay, & a letter brings me at once pleasure & remorse. Your packet last night found me sitting down to a portrait of The Maidservant’ for next Examiner;28 but I found time, after my poached egg, to read the Johnson through, & shall be happy for my own gratification to criticise it in a week or two. My huge review,29 after making almost a mummy of my head, went to Edinburgh by the mail on Saturday, & I have reason to know is in good time. I wash my hands in future of all biographical reviews, being somewhat overvirtuous in matters of dates, corresponding facts, & ‘other gentilities’, as Metastasio[?] says of the hypochondria.30—I need not assure you I sympathised with your nervous attack. I know too well its’ highway assaults, as well as the others. God send that you may never have occasion for the endurance that I have had; or that if you have, the

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recollection of my sallow & soldier-like visage compared with my present reasonable state of health may give you the proper hope. Believe me ever what you think me— Your’s most identically, Leigh Hunt. P.S. Your sonnet almost slipped my recollection, especially as I have never seen it. When did it come, or by what, or whom? Pray let me have a copy immediately, though by the way I cannot promise its appearance next week, as a friend will expect one of my own—a sonnet to Haydon.31 [Written on the inside of the wrapper] ‘Will you come & take your chop with us next Saturday—my birthday? Haydon I expect will be our guest.’ [9. This letter in the sequence is missing.] 10. Unpublished. Text here from manuscript; no address; no postmark. Marlow—

May 1817.

My dear [Sir crossed out] friend, (For you must allow me to drop a formality, which has nothing to do with our sort of mutual respect) I have had my proper quantity of remorse for delaying this answer to your letter, but I have been driving my quill hard for these two or three days,—so much so indeed, that after all, I can but write you a much shorter epistle than I could wish;—but it is full of sincerity & affectionate recollections. In the first place then, I shall be truly happy in your typographical services; & to tell you a secret, I had requested Keats32 to ask for them in case he was going out of town, but I scratched out the passage for fear I might be demanding an attention of you which just now you might not be able to give.—When Bensley therefore sends me another proof, you shall have it with another letter. H. & myself will be happy to employ your old nurse33 [two Secondly, words erased] whether we return to Hampstead or (which is probable) go to live for a while in the New Road or Regent’s Park,—that is to say, provided, in the latter instance, she can send us our clothes, which as the distance is not great & the payment about 18 or a week, might perhaps be worth her while. If not, I may perhaps hit upon some other method of helping her a little. Thirdly, I will write to Hazlitt the beginning of the week, & request him the first time he does not use the ticket34 himself & has not already promised it, to send it to Warner St. We shall be back again the middle of June; I though sorry to leave one most excellent friend,35 shall of course be very happy to join a greater

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number of others [several words erased] Pray tell Henry Robertson, if you see him, that I will endeavour to make amends, before I return, for not writing to him at Plymouth;—& believe me ever Most truly & cordially your’s Leigh Hunt. To/C.C. Clarke. 11. Unpublished. Text here from manuscript; addressed, ‘To/ C.C. Clarke,/ 6. Little Warner Street,/Great Warner Street, Clerkenwell.’; postmark, ‘8 o’Clock.MY.29.1817 . Albion House—Marlow Tuesday May 27. 1817. My dear friend, I do not mean to startle you, when I tell you that your letter to H, startled me;—but here have I been waiting with wonder-mouthed patience all this while, wondering why Bensley never sent me a proof,36 & hoping that you would not think I had treated your kind offer with negligence. The fact is, I ought to have told you, as I told Junkets in my letter to him,37 that my plan was to see the proofs first myself, & then to get my friend to see the revise:—not that I am not heartily & thankfully content to leave such a matter, abstractedly speaking, entirely in such hands as yours,—but that there are two or three passages I had finally resolved to alter, one of which accordingly was altered on the proof which I last returned. However, between you & me, I am very glad that the 2.nd edition has continued it’s escape through the press with so little trouble to me, only as I have altered the said passage, I should like not to leave the others, which are but one or two, & might be thrown into Errata. I could wish also to put an ‘Advertisement to the Second Edition’ at the end or beginning of the Preface. Be good enough therefore, my dear fellow, to let me know whether Bensley, in his punishment of my delay, has finally & remorselessly closed the printing of the book, and if not, I will immediately send up the Addenda.38 You should have them now, & indeed I have nearly finished my Advertisement, but I wish to clip it here & there & make a proper ivory ball of it, to roll becomingly before me. If the door however be closed, think no more of the business but as a pleasant fillip which my inattention deserved. Your industry & friendly zeal deserve the praise of a better man of business, but they cannot have that of a warmer & more grateful friend than Yours most cordially, Leigh Hunt. P.S. I want you very much not to have an instant’s nervousness about this matter,—if indeed such a feeling came over you. On reading over my

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letter indeed, it struck me that I [two words crossed out] need not have told you of the existence of this plan of mine, but here my self-love as well as my indolence steps in to prevent my writing over again, as the knowledge of it will perhaps give me a little lift in your good graces in the systematic score, [one word erased] In short, it is myself, I dare say, whom you will think nervous.—Pray continue to let Novello know for me that we all like the piano, & that I will write to him again shortly.39—Thanks for your trouble about the day, & for your little Esculapianisms. P.P.S. I am quite well again now, & shall keep your elixir for another time.—I do not mean to publish the Hero & Leander by itself, but in company with four or five other little stories which will make a volume by next winter. I am now indulging my political & poetical faculties at the same time with the [two words erased] lovely patriotic freak of the famous Countess of Coventry. My next historiette, I think, will be William Tell, & then for a bridal holiday perhaps with Bacchus & Ariadne.40 12. Extracted in Recollections, pp. 194–5 (missing out the opening and an important passage on Keats). Text here from manuscript; addressed, ‘To/ Charles C.larke,/6. Little Warner treet,/ Warner Street,/ Clerkenwell.’: no postmark: Maida Hill—Paddington July 1817. My dear friend, The only thing I have to say for myself in not being beforehand with you in a letter, is that had you delayed it a few hours longer, I should have been so. However, it afforded me a fresh & unconscious proof of the niceness of your feelings in all things, since [you crossed out] in asking for the Opera ticket41 again you say not a word of it’s never having yet been sent to you. [I saw Hazlitt here last night, & he apologizes to me, as I doubt not he will to you, for having delayed till he cannot send it at all. You shall have it without fail if you send for it to the office on Thursday, though with still greater pleasure if you come & fetch it yourself in the mean time. You shall read Hero and Leander with me, & riot also in a translation or two from Theocritus,42 which are, or ought to be, all that is fine, floral, & fruity, & any other f that you can find to furnish out a finished festivity. But you have not left off your [word crossed out] lectures, I trust, on punctuality. Pray do not, for I am very willing to take & even to profit by them; and ecce signum! I answer your letter by return of post. You began this reformation in me; my friend Shelley followed it up nobly; & you must know, that friendship can do just as much with me, as enmity can do little.—What has become of Junkets I know not. I suppose Queen Mab has eaten him.] If not, I [doubt not crossed out] have no doubt that he will appear before long

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very penitent, & poetical, & really sorry.43 He wants a little more adversity perhaps to make him attend to others as much in reality, as he wishes to do in theory; & all that we can hope at present is, that a youth of his ardour may not bring too much upon him too soon.—My criticism by the way has been finished, & at the office, some weeks, but very awkwardly kept out by the press of other matter; and as it is, it must be split into two further parts for the two next Sundays.44 [I came to town last Wednesday, spent Saturday evening with Henry Robertson, who has been unwell, & supped yesterday with Novello. Harry tells me there is news of the arrival of Havell;45 & so we are conspiring to get all together again, and have one of our old evenings, joco-serio-musicopictorio-poetical. Most sincerely your’s, Leigh Hunt.] P.S. Many thanks for what I return. [13. This letter in the sequence is missing.] 14. Unpublished. Text here from manuscript; addressed, ‘To/ C.C. Clarke/6. Little Warner Street,/Great Warner Street,/Clerkenwell.’; postmark, ‘2 o’Clock 24.SP’ […]: Marlow Tuesday Sept. 23. 1817. My dear friend, I take hasty advantage of my friend Shelley’s going to town to get a note to you with the two-penny post, & to relieve my character from the strange imputation you must have cast upon it in spite of your friendship in consequence of having overlooked a part of my letter. You could hardly suppose I would have been so forgetful as to think [of you crossed out] (pretty anomaly this!) of your going abroad without having your expenses paid. I am pretty sure I particularly mentioned that they were to be so, liberally, & beforehand; & by expenses I mean all expenses, both there, & back, & intermediate.46 Will this leave you free to go? Many thanks at any rate for you kind letter to your affectionate friend Leigh Hunt. 15–16. Two missing letters. One of these provided the text for the undated letter belonging to December 1818 printed in Recollections, pp. 199–201:47

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[December 1818] To C.C.C. And so Charles Clarke is very angry with me for not sooner answering his two letters, and talks to my friends about my ‘regal scorn.’ Well,—I have been guilty certainly of not sooner answering said two;—I have not answered them, even though they pleased me infinitely:—Charles Clarke also sent me some verses, the goodness of which (if he will not be very angry) even surprised me, yet I answered not:—he sent them me again, yet I answered not:—undoubtedly I have been extremely unresponsive; I have seemed to neglect him,—I have been silent, dilatory, unepistolary, strange, distant miles, and (if the phrase ‘regal scorn’ be true) without an excuse. C.C.C. (meditative, but quick)—Ho, not without an excuse, I dare say. Come, come, I ought to have thought of that, before I used the words ‘regal scorn.’ I did not mean them in fact, and therefore I thought they would touch him. Bless my soul, I ought to have thought of an excuse for him, now I think of it;—let me see;—he must have been very busy;—yes, yes, he was very busy, depend upon it:—I should not wonder if he had some particular reason for being busy just now;—I warrant you he has been writing like the Devil;—I’ll stake my life on’t,—he has almost set his tingling head asleep like my foot, with writing;—and then too, you may be certain he reproached himself every day nevertheless with not writing to me;—I’ll be bound to say that he said: I will write to Charles Clarke today, and I will not forget to give another notice to him in the Examiner (for he did give one), and above all, he will see his verses there, and then he will guess all;—then one day he is busy till it is too late to write by the post, and in some cursed hurry he forgets me on Saturday, and then—and what then? Am I not one of his real friends? Have I not a right to be forgotten or rather unwritten to by him, for weeks, if by turning his looks, not his heart, away from me, he can snatch repose upon the confidence of my good opinion of him? I think I see him asking me this; and curse me (I beg your pardon, Miss Jones), but confound me, I should say—no, I should not say,—but the deuce take—in short, here’s the beginning of his letter, and so there’s an end of my vagaries. My dear friend, you are right. I have been very busy,—so busy both summer and winter, that summer has scarcely been any to me; and my head at times has almost grown benumbed over my writing. I have been intending everything and anything, except loyal anticonstitutionalism and Christian want of charity. I have written prose, I have written poetry, I have written levities and gravities, I have written two acts of a Tragedy,48 and (oh Diva pecunia) I have written a Pocket-Book!49 Let my Morocco blushes speak for me; for with this packet comes a copy. When you read my Calendar of Nature, you will feel that I did not forget you; for you are one of those in whose company I always seem to be writing these things. Had your poetry arrived soon enough, I should have said ‘Oh, ho!’ and

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clapped it among my PocketBook prisoners. As it is, it must go at large in the Examiner, where it will be found accordingly in a week or two. And here let me say, that bad as I have been, I begged Mr. Holmes50 to explain why I had not written; so that if he has been a negligent epistolian as well as myself, why—there are two good fellows who have done as they ought not to have done, and there is no epistle in us. (Here Charles Clarke gives a laugh, which socially speaking is very musical; but abstractedly, resembles fifty Fawcetts,51 or ten rusty iron gates scraping along gravel.) You must know that you must keep my tragic drama a secret, unless you have one female ear into which you can own for me the rough impeachment. (Here ten gates.) It is on the same subject as the ‘Cid’ of Corneille; and I mean it to be ready by the middle of January for the so theatre, if you will get your hands in training meantime, I trust, God willing, the groundlings will have their ears split. If not, I shall make up my mind, like a damned vain fellow, that they are too large and tough; and so with this new pun in your throat, go you along with me in as many things as you did before, my dear friend, for I am ever the same, most truly yours, LEIGH HUNT. P.S.—The verses marked Ø in the Pocket-Book are mine, ∆ Mr. Shelley’s, P.R. a Mr. Proctor’s, and I. Keats’s,52 who has just lost his brother Tom after a most exemplary attendance on him.53 The close of such lingering illness, however, can hardly be lamented. Mr. Richards,54 who has just dropped in upon me, begs to be remembered to you.

*** The remaining letters from Hunt to Clarke in the Novello-Clarke Collection were written after Keats’s death on 20 February 1821. Poignantly, the next letter in the sequence, numbered ‘17’ and dated 31 August 1821, is concerned with setting up a musical evening at Novello’s. The final letter in the sequence printed by Cowden Clarke is very telling about his relationship with Hunt. Hunt’s correspondence with Clarke is full of apologies for his delays in replying, but the letter of December 1818 betrays an underlying irritation both with Clarke’s importunity and with what Clarke had been reported saying about Hunt’s ‘regal scorn’ behind his back. It is clear from the correspondence as a whole that Clarke was eager to impress Hunt with his literary abilities, and hoped that Hunt would publish his poetry. On 17 October 1816 Hunt had Clarke’s ‘copy books’ temporarily in his possession, though he had not yet looked at them closely for in his postscript he protests that he has never seen a copy of the latter’s ‘sonnet’. Clarke was presumably referring to his ‘Sonnet on Peace’ which Hunt would have found picked out with a paragraph mark in the commonplace book (p. 273). But even though Hunt

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asked for a copy of the sonnet immediately, warning that he could ‘not promise its appearance next [week in the Examiner] as a friend will expect one of my own on Hazlitt’, Clarke’s poem never appeared in the periodical. Hunt’s letter of December 1818 shows that he had by then commissioned one ‘notice’ in the Examiner by Clarke, probably a theatrical review, and promised him another (neither can now be identified). He also promised to print the ‘verses’ which Clarke had evidently sent to him twice at the Examiner. Once more he failed to do so. The verses in question were almost certainly Clarke’s effusion ‘On Visiting a Beautiful Little Dell near Margate’, which Hunt eventually published along with Clarke’s prose essay describing his favourite haunts near Enfield in the second Literary Pocket-Book, published in 1819 for the year 1820.55 Clarke himself later claimed this as his first published poem, saying that as the Literary Pocket-Book contained work by, among others, Shelley, Keats, Ollier, and Hunt, ‘so… I ventured forth into the world of letters in most “worshipful society”’.56 It is clear from this that Hunt, for all his obvious friendship for Clarke, did not think well enough of his poetry to publish it in the Examiner, even though it meant he had to prevaricate with Clarke on at least two occasions, first in October 1816 and then in December 1818. Nor is Hunt’s reference to Clarke’s grating laughter as fifty-fold stronger than that of the comic actor Fawcett, like ‘ten rusty iron gates scraping along gravel’, a simple genial mockery of a friend. Hunt’s letter of December 1818 combines an elaborately disguised irritation at Clarke’s persistence with a need, at once amused and exasperated, to maintain a friendship which Hunt found useful as well as genuinely supportive. Charles (or perhaps, Mary) Cowden Clarke’s later gloss on Hunt’s letter is at once ingenuous and impercipient: [Hunt’s letter] begins without set form of address, plunging at once, in sportive fashion, into a whimsically-worded yet most kindly rebuke to C.C.C. for having been impatient at his friend’s delay in answering a communication. The reference to the actor Fawcett and his grating laugh comes in with as pleasant an effect as the reference to John Keats’s loss of his brother Tom strikes with painfully vivid impression after this long lapse of years:—57 Clearly Cowden Clarke could be awkward and demanding, and required Hunt’s patience. On the other hand, as his involvement in the last-minute revisions of the second edition of The Story of Rimini shows, he was eager to give Hunt practical help. His own ambitions may also help to explain why, quite apart from the speed with which Keats developed, Clarke should have drifted away from his onetime student. Between 1812, when at 25 he wrote a poem dedicating himself to poetry,58 and late 1818, Clarke was trying to move from teaching to a literary career. Clarke’s copying of his own poetry into the commonplace

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book is most extensive in early 1814, just as Keats was attempting his first poems. Although Clarke had met Charles Ollier in 1812 and Leigh Hunt before he went to prison early in 1813, Keats was not introduced to either until after 9 October 1816, just before he was 21, even though Hunt had, six months earlier, printed his first published poem, ‘O Solitude’, in the pages of the Examiner, through Clarke’s good offices. The generosity and openness of Keats’s verse epistle to Cowden Clarke, written from Margate in September 1816, a month earlier, is proof of the warmth of the relationship between them and of the genuine help Clarke gave to the younger man. Clarke may have thought that his protégé’s introduction to Hunt should be delayed until Keats had committed himself to poetry, though he may also have been understandably reluctant to introduce the precocious Keats to Hunt until he had established his own standing with the Examiner’s editor. Once the meeting between Keats and Hunt had been effected Clarke was quickly left behind by his pupil. The speed with which Keats became an intimate member of Hunt’s circle, and then published his first volume in 1817, to be followed by the 4,000 lines of Endymion in 1818, left Clarke far behind. In late 1818 Clarke was still trying to get Hunt to publish his first poem, and to give him more reviewing. A good measure of the difference between Keats’s relationship with Hunt and Clarke’s is given by the letter Keats wrote on 10 May 1817 and an unpublished letter which Clarke sent Hunt on 12 March 1818. Keats’s letter, full of puns and jokes, is that of an equal to an equal addressed to ‘My dear Hunt’.59 From 1813 until 2 May 1817 Hunt and Clarke had addressed one another formally as ‘My Dear Sir’. Only on 2 May 1817 did Hunt change to ‘My dear Friend’. Clarke’s letter of 12 March 1818, written to thank Hunt for a gift copy of Foliage, is that of an acolyte. It is mainly taken up with singing the praises of Hunt’s poetry. When he ventures criticism Clarke immediately backs down—‘however, I am sure that I object with diffidence since I feel how far you outstrip me in all matters of taste’.60 Clarke reminds Hunt that he was with Hunt on Hampstead Heath when the epistle To Thomas Moore’ was composed in 1816. He concludes by saying ‘how delighted and gratified’ he is that Hunt has published ‘the sonnet to Keats in which my obscure self was noticed’ (as Charles ‘warm and wise’ in line 12)—‘Who’, asks Clarke, ‘will the Commentators of 3118 decide C.C.C. to have been?’ While both Hunt and Clarke clearly recognised the extraordinary powers of Keats, his youth also set him apart. Where Keats was his own man by late spring 1817, Clarke’s continuing role even in December of the following year was to flatter and court the editor and older poet. Well might both Hunt and Clarke have felt critical earlier in mid-1817 of the younger man, who had rejected the Olliers as publishers in favour of Taylor and Hessey, and who had already turned against Hunt’s influence and taste; Keats told Haydon on 11 May 1817 that Hunt was a ‘Selfdeluder’ who flattered himself ‘into an idea of being a great Poet’.61 Clarke’s fawning and grateful letter of December 1818

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shows him to have been one of those who supported Hunt’s delusions. The two men’s long friendship, and Clarke’s generous picture of Hunt in Recollections of Writers, reflect their differing but mutual need for one another’s support. The evidence of the Novello-Clarke Collection provides a much sharper account of the ambitions, thinking and taste of Charles Cowden Clarke, and of his relations with Hunt, than is otherwise available. Clarke is interesting because he is representative. He was an eager reader of the Examiner, and his enthusiasm for poetry, idealistic libertarian politics and belief in ‘contemporary’ literature have much to tell us about the values of Hunt and his circle in these important early years.

Notes 1 A version of this chapter was published in Romanticism, 3, 1 (1997), pp. 66–90; the material appears here by permission of the editors. I am grateful to the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library, for permission to reproduce material from the Novello—Cowden Clarke Collection. My particular thanks are due to Mr C.Sheppard, Head of Special Collections, Leeds University Library, for advice and help. Cowden Clarke’s Commonplace Book is discussed in Joan Coldwell, ‘Charles Cowden Clarke’s Commonplace Book, and its Relationship to Keats’, K-SJ, 29 (1980), pp. 83–95, supplemented and corrected in one important respect (the period when Clarke was most actively filling in its blank pages) in ‘Charles Cowden Clarke’s “Cockney” Commonplace Book’, K&H, pp. 65–87, hereafter ‘Clarke’s “Cockney” Commonplace Book’. 2 On Clarke’s misdating of this last letter, see note 47. 3 This information comes from a second copy, given to Portia Gigliucci by her aunt, Mary Cowden Clarke. In January 1879 Portia Gigliucci wrote on its half title: ‘On the blank leaves inserted in this copy of my aunt’s & my uncle’s book, I have written the passages which were omitted from the original manuscript by wish of those to whom Publishers committed the unwarrantable task of altering that which the “Author couple” had been requested to write! /P/G./ Villa Novello—Genoa/Jan 1879.’ 4 Recollections of Writers (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searl, & Rivington, 1878), p. 17, hereafter Recollections. 5 Theodore Fenner, Leigh Hunt and Opera Criticism, The ‘Examiner’ Years 1808–1821 (Lawrence, Manhattan, Wichita: University of Kansas Press, 1972), pp. 29, 53– 4. Henry Gattie (1744–1844) was an actor singer at Drury Lane from 1813; he also taught the violin and pianoforte from 16 York Buildings, New Road. See also Hunt’s sonnet, To Henry Robertson, John Gattie, and Vincent Novello: Not keeping their appointed hour’, published in Foliage, p. cxxiv. Thomas Richards was an ex-pupil of Clarke’s (see note 54). 6 See Blunden, pp. 57–8. 7 The book referred to is Some Account of the Life and Writings of L.F. de Vega Capio (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806) by Henry Fox, Baron Holland. Hunt used this work as a source for his abortive drama on the Cid (see note 48).

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8 Perhaps John Powell, watercolour painter, who exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1796 to 1829. 9 Sudie Nostrand, ‘The Keats Circle: Further Letters’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of New York, 1973), pp. 120–2, gives the text of this letter. 10 Nephew of Gilbert White. White, a liberal interested in literature, lived in the ‘vicinity’ of Enfield and was visited by the young Clarke (Recollections, pp. 7–9). He allowed Clarke use of his library. 11 Holt White was reacting to two articles in E ((27 March 1814), pp. 193–95, (10 April 1814), pp. 238–40) describing the setting up of the West London Lancastrian Society Association, a philanthropic organisation hoping to use the monitorial system developed by Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838) for teaching large numbers of children. There had been a debate in the pages of The Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review in 1810 and 1811 over the merits of Lancaster’s system and that of Dr Andrew Bell’s Madras system. Nostrand notes that Holt White’s article seems not to have been accepted by E, but mentions that there is an anonymous article on the ‘Increase of the Poor’ in the issue for 26 February 1815. See ‘Increase of the Poor. [From a Correspondent.]’, E (26 February 1815), pp. 129–30. 12 Richard Glover (1712–85) published his epic poem Leonidas in 1737. He was identified as the pseudonymous author Junius in R. Duppa’s An Inquiry concerning the Author of the Letters of Junius (London: John Murray, 1814). Junius is now thought to have been Sir Philip Francis (1740–1818). 13 Duppa edited Glover’s Memoirs by a Distinguished Literary and Political Character (London: John Murray, 1813). 14 William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham (1708–78). 15 Junius: including letters by the same writer…to which are added…his private letters to Mr. H.S.Woodfall…(3 vols, London: G.Woodfall, 1812). 16 The Descent of Liberty: A Mask (London: Gale, Curtis and Fenner, 1815). 17 That is, Feast. See note 24 for the copies of this and the preceding given to Clarke by Hunt. 18 Hunt’s references are as follows—‘Crudel perche finora’, the duettino between Count Almaviva and Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro, III. ii, No. 16; ‘Del prendi un dolce amplesso’, the duettino between Sextus and Annius in La Climenza di Tito, I. i, No. 3; ‘Voi che sapete’, Cherubino’s canzone, Figaro, II. iii, No. 11; ‘Non so piu cosa son’, Cherubino’s aria, Figaro, I. vi, No. 6; ‘La ci darem la mano’, the duet between Don Giovanni and Zerlina, Don Giovanni, I. iii, No.7; ‘Secondate, aurette amiche’, the duet between Ferrando and Guglielmo, Cost fan Tutte, II. ii, No. 21; ‘Su l’aria’, the duettino between Susanna and the Countess, Figaro, III. x, No. 20; ‘La mia Dorabella’, opening trio, Cosi fan Tutte, I. i, No. 1. 19 Vincent Novello (1781–1861), musician, composer and arranger. 20 Unidentified. 21 C.H.Reynell of 21 Piccadilly, London. 22 When the book appeared the publishers were named as ‘Gale, Curtis, and Fenner, Paternoster Row’. It is dated 1815. 23 ‘Now the bright morning Star, Day’s harbinger,/Comes dancing from the east, and leads with her/The flowery May….’, ‘Song on May Morning’, ll. 1–3. 24 Mary Cowden Clarke pasted a note to the foot of the letter,‘“The Descent of Liberty” and “The Feast of the Poets with other pieces in verse”’. As noted above, this letter is kept with Hunt’s gift copy of The Descent of Liberty. The

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25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43

44 45

John Barnard Novello-Cowden Clarke Collection also has Hunt’s gift copy to Clarke of Feast (1815) in a matching binding. An Address to that Quarterly Reviewer…(London: R.Jennings, 1816). See following discussion in main text. Ibid., pp. 20–1. Almost certainly a reference to Clarke’s Commonplace Book started in 1810 and, most probably, a companion volume, or volumes, for 1814 to 1816, which evidently had empty pages. On the dating of Clarke’s entries in the extant commonplace book, see ‘Clarke’s “Cockney” Commonplace Book’, pp. 67–8. E (20 October 1816), pp. 664–5. Hunt’s review of the poetical works of Wyatt and Howard appeared in The Edinburgh Review, (27 December 1816), pp. 390–422. The author’s name is hard to decipher. Quotation untraced. To Benjamin Robert Haydon’ was published in E (20 October 1816), p. 663. Writing on 10 May from Margate, Keats told Hunt that on arriving there c. 24 April he had written to his brother George ‘to request C.C.C. to do the thing you wot of respecting Rimini; and George tells me he has undertaken it with great Pleasure’, LJK, I: p. 137. The second edition of The Story of Rimini was printed by Thomas Bensley for Taylor and Hessey and others. The need to find a place for Clarke’s ‘old nurse’ was probably due to his father’s impending retirement from Enfield School to live at Ramsgate. Probably a complimentary ticket for the Examiner’s drama critic. Hazlitt reviewed Don Giovanni on 9 June 1817. Hunt was still hoping that Clarke might get the ticket shortly after 1 July (see letter 12), but Hunt himself reviewed La Clemenza di Tito on 27 July 1817. See Theodore Fenner, Leigh Hunt and Opera Criticism, p. 260. The Hunts had been staying with the Shelleys at Marlow. Of The Story of Rimini Presumably the letter to which Keats replied on 10 May (see note 32). Hunt was too late. The second edition of The Story of Rimini (London: Taylor and Hessey; R.Triphook and C. and J.Ollier, 1817), printed by Bensley, has an Erratum (p. iii) but no Advertisement. Hunt had written to Novello on 17 April 1817 asking for a piano for Shelley, Recollections, p. 196. In the event, two of these poems, ‘Hero and Leander’, and ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’, appeared in The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, Vol. 2 (London: C. and J.Ollier, 1819). ‘Godiva’ was first published in The New Monthly Magazine (March, 1850). Hunt appears not to have written the poem on William Tell. See note 34. In Foliage, pp. 23–61. There is no clear evidence of the exact cause of this falling out. However, the day after Keats wrote his apparently friendly letter to Hunt from Margate on 10 May 1817 he wrote to Haydon attacking Hunt’s ‘self delusions’, LJK, I: pp. 136– 40, 143). The second and third parts of Hunt’s review of Keats’s Poems (1817) appeared in E on 6 and 13 July 1817. The first part had been published on 1 June. William Havell (1782–1857), landscape watercolourist and friend of Novello’s (see Recollections, p. 105). Either the same as or related to the ‘R. Havell’, the ‘eminent’ landscape artist, recorded in Hunt’s The Literary Pocket-Book: or

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46 47

48

49

50

51 52

53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

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Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art. 1819 (London: C. and J.Ollier, 1818) as living at 3 Chapel Street, Tottenham Court Road (p. 168). Possibly on some business for the Examiner? Clarke mistakenly dates the letter late 1819, ‘the first year in which [The Literary Pocket-Book] appeared’. However, for the 1819 issue of Hunt’s literary diary to appear, printing had to be completed in the autumn of the preceding year. In November 1818 Hunt announced that he had been writing The Pocket-Book and that ‘the booksellers tell me it will do exceedingly well’; see Blunden, p. 137. Hunt’s play on El Cid was, he told Shelley in August, based on Lord Holland’s lives of Don Evillen de Castro and of Lope de Vega—Clarke had lent the second of these to the imprisoned Hunt in 1814 (see p. 36). The play was never acted or published. In July 1819 Hunt reported that it had been turned down by Kean at Drury Lane and also by Covent Garden (Blunden, pp. 137, 140). The Literary Pocket-Book: or Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art. 1819 (1818). The British Library copy of the first issue is in fact bound in black, but was probably originally bound in red like the subsequent volumes (Ashley 910). There were five issues for the years 1819 to 1823. The volume cost half a crown. On its success see Blunden, pp. 137–9. The Ollier brothers were eager to acquire copyright: see their two letters of 22 July 1819 offering Hunt £200 together with additional payments for editing and for copy, British Library, Add. Mss. 38, 108. ff. 197–9. Edward Holmes, pianist, teacher and music writer. A friend of Clarke, he had also been his pupil at Enfield School. See Richard Altick, The Cowden Clarkes (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 16, 22. John Fawcett (1768–1837), actor and dramatist, at this time working at Covent Garden. Hunt’s two poems are ‘Power and Gentleness’ (pp. 217–18) and ‘The Summer of 1818’ (pp. 225–6); Shelley’s poem was ‘Marianne’s Dream’ (pp. 218–22); Procter (Barry Cornwall) published ‘Hymn to Diana’ (pp. 222–4) and ‘Sonnet. Descriptive of a Painting of Nicolas Poussin’ (p. 224); Keats’s two poems were ‘Human Seasons’ and ‘Sonnet to Ailsa Crag’ (p. 225). Tom Keats died on 1 December 1818. The index to Recollections identifies him as Tom Richards, that is, Thomas Richards who had left Enfield School at about the same time Keats went there, and became a clerk in the Ordinance Office at the Tower. Clarke said that he owed his love of literature to Richards (Robert Gittings, John Keats (London: Heinemann, 1968, p. 108). His brother Charles had printed Cowden Clarke’s An Address to that Quarterly Reviewer…(1816) (see above, pp. 43–5) and had also printed Keats’s Poems (1817) for the Olliers (Gittings, p. 167, and LJK, I: p. 121 and n.). The Literary Pocket-Book…1820 (1819), pp. 135–7, 140–43. Clarke’s essay was the first of a series of ‘Walks Round London’. Recollections, p. 28. Ibid., p. 199. See ‘Clarke’s “Cockney” Commonplace Book’, pp. 79–80. LJK, I: 137. British Library, Add. Mss. 38, 108 f. 195b. LJK, I: 143.

4

Leigh Hunt’s Foliage A Cockney manifesto Jeffrey N.Cox

In his sonnet, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, Keats pictures poets ruling ‘realms of gold/… Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold’ (1, 4). This image of each writer as a separate country has dominated our approach to the Romantic poets. We discriminate among these poets’ radically differing visions and politics and yet continue to insist that they owe a kind of fealty to an all-embracing literary movement, Romanticism, a movement to which none of them explicitly subscribed. It seems difficult for us, despite our commitment to Romanticism as a period concept, to see strong similarities between, say, Keats and Byron or even Keats and Shelley—let alone any of these three poets and the man who bound them together in friendship and in verse, Leigh Hunt. We have, in other words, a conception of Romanticism that is too abstract and, at the same time, over particularised. Our notion of the solitary Romantic artist needs to be replaced with a more social account of creation. In Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School I argued that we need to locate Romantic culture neither in the isolated individual nor in an abstract ‘spirit of the age’, but in the lived communities within which these writers worked.1 While not wishing to abandon the notion of Romanticism as an organising idea of our period, I find it significant that these writers were, at the time, not known as Romantic poets but as members of groups, schools, circles. When we think of literary circles and clubs, we usually think of eighteenth-century coffee houses, groups like the Dilettanti, and gatherings ranging from the Kit Kats to Johnson’s Literary Club. Such clubbiness continued in the Romantic period’s political societies, scientific circles and literary schools. Byron was a member of both the Whig Club and the Hampden Club, and he proposed founding with Hobhouse a ‘Couplet Club’. There were official cultural groups like the Royal Academy, and informal or private ones such as the Zetosophian Society which John Hamilton Reynolds joined. There were school links— between Keats and the community at Enfield School, for instance, or between Hunt and the ‘Bluecoat Boys’ from Christ’s Hospital. Then there were professional connections, such as Blake’s with London artists, illustrators and

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printers, or Keats’s with medical men. In the literary world, there were publicly identified groups of poets—the Bluestockings, the Della Cruscans, the Lake School, the Satanic School, and the Cockney School. Less visible gatherings included the circle around Joseph Johnson, which in the 1790s included Paine, Wollstonecraft, Godwin and Blake, and the community in Liverpool that in the 1820s centered around Felicia Hemans and William Roscoe. 2 Romanticism is discovered neither in the poet alone on the mountaintop nor through some ineffable spirit blowing over the literary landscape. Romanticism arose, instead, through the kind of communal surmise that Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’ sonnet celebrates, in poetry (‘I heard Chapman’), in science (‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies’) and exploration (‘like stout Cortez’). Individuals were brought together to create Romantic culture through collective acts of collaboration and contest. Romanticism, in other words, arose through the work of interconnected circles, groups which were sometimes allied and, at other times, engaged in open warfare. Many are concerned that such a turn from the individual to the group and from the isolated text to include its context reduces the poet to mirroring the given, the poem to mere reflexivity. While we should stress the creative power of poetry, we ought not to mystify that power through individualistic notions of creativity. If the creation of poetry is more than simple reflection, that does not mean that creativity comes from isolated genius, from the poet as a nightingale singing in the darkling gloom. God may be able to create alone; human beings always create in collaboration. We have identified many ways in which creativity is mediated by, say, the social nature of language or the collective nature of literary production, but such notions, I think, still leave the position of the creator in place: mediation intimates the priority of something to be mediated. Again, we talk of the dialogic, heteroglossic nature of texts, but we need to move the moment of dialogue back to the moment of the creation of the text. Harold Bloom had a sense of the dialogue into which each poet and poem entered, but his was an antihistorical narrative of strong poets struggling in eternity over an abstract muse. The kind of dialogue I have in view is more concrete, a lived conversation, a collective, collaborative process. A key example of such collective work is found in the group of poets, artists and intellectuals gathered around Leigh Hunt, known, at least by their opponents, as the Cockney School. Recent criticism has revised our sense of the Cockney School and its power.3 As I have argued in Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, Hunt was the intellectual and political leader of the Cockney School and thus, more generally speaking, of ‘second generation’ English Romanticism. To the conservative critics at Blackwood’s Magazine (6 October 1819) Hunt was ‘the most fierce democrat and demagogue’ of the day; to supporters of reform he was a martyr imprisoned for lampooning the Regent. For a wider audience he was both the successful poet of The Story of Rimini and the provocative editor of the Examiner. Traditional scholarship

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followed Hunt’s enemies at Blackwood’s in seeing the Cockneys as a secondhand school of poetry that Keats outgrew. We can now see that the Cockney School in fact named the community out of which arose the work of Keats, Hazlitt, Hunt, and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as less well-known writers such as Horace Smith, John Hamilton Reynolds, ‘Barry Cornwall’ and Cornelius Webb. We can learn much about the shape of the Cockney School—its composition, alliances, literary tactics and cultural vision—from a key volume published during the circle’s most active period, Leigh Hunt’s Foliage of 1818.4 Upon opening Foliage and seeing the table of contents, Hunt’s readers—contemporary and modern—are greeted with numerous ‘occasional poems’, sonnets and epistles arising at particular moments and addressed to particular individuals. Hunt names those with whom he wishes to announce publicly his cultural alliance, and it is significant that he names them in Foliage whereas, when the poems were first published in the Examiner, these same individuals appeared under the guise of initials and pseudonyms. Published in 1818, some four or five months after Blackwood’s launched the Cockney School attacks, Foliage proudly defines a roster of the Hunt circle. It recreates the living group textually. This is not the only attempt to create a textual body for the Hunt circle, a Cockney corpus. Hunt’s reviews of members of the group, particularly ‘Young Poets’ (Examiner (1 December 1816)), announce the formation of a new school, a claim he reiterates in the Preface to Foliage. Like Foliage, Keats’s Poems (1817) brings together members of the group on the printed page. One finds in these volumes, and throughout the work of the group, poems addressed to other members—poems by Reynolds and Keats on Hunt’s Story of Rimini, for example, or Horace Smith’s To Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq, on His Poems’, or Lamb’s ‘To the Author of Poems Published under the Name of Barry Cornwall’; there are dedications of works to fellow writers, of Hunt’s Rimini to Byron, of Keats’s Poems and Shelley’s The Cenci to Hunt, of Hunt’s translation of Tasso’s Amyntas to Keats. There were also collaborative projects, such as the projected volume of Boccaccio adaptations begun by Keats and Reynolds and The Round Table (1817) undertaken primarily by Hunt and Hazlitt but also involving Lamb and Thomas Barnes, a school friend of Hunt’s who contributed to the Examiner and became editor of The Times. In other words, the Hunt circle, the Cockney School, is not some context external to these texts but an inherent part of the texts themselves. A key rhetorical feature of these texts is that repeatedly they invoke particular artistic and intellectual allies, and thus evoke a Cockney ethos, the life of the circle of which they were all a part. In the face of increasingly strident attacks, these writers constantly announced their allegiance to one other in their poetry. Foliage is a particularly strong example of Hunt’s textual alliances. There are poems to Keats and Shelley, Hazlitt and Lamb. There is a sonnet to John

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Hamilton Reynolds, also celebrated by Hunt in ‘Young Poets’, and one to Horace Smith, the wealthy financier famous as the co-author of the satiric Rejected Addresses and of whom Hunt wrote, ‘A finer nature than Horace Smith’s, except in the single instance of Shelley, I never met with in man’.5 There is an epistle to Barren Field, drama critic for The Times, a future judge, and the author of the curious volume First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819), which was reviewed by Lamb in the Examiner (16 January 1820).6 Other arts are not neglected. The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon is praised as Painter indeed, gifted, laborious, true’ (1. 2).7 The world of music is invoked in sonnets to Henry Robertson, opera critic for the Examiner and, later, treasurer of Covent Garden; to John Gattie, brother-in-law to the publisher Charles Ollier and known for his strong voice; and, most importantly, to Vincent Novello, organist at the Portuguese Embassy chapel, founding member of the Philharmonic Society and editor of Mozart, Haydn and Purcell. It was Novello who brought the glories of Italian music into the group and hosted musical parties which were celebrated by Hunt and Lamb. These poems establish the reach of the Cockney School into all fields of art, as Blackwood’s acknowledged (5 April 1819, p. 97) in its attack depicting Hunt’s home as a court where he is king, Keats and Hazlitt are courtiers, Haydon is the ‘Cockney Raphael’ and Novello the court musician. The Examiner is, of course, the court gazette. Foliage’s gathering of sociable sonnets (see Figure 3) evokes the cultural life of the group. The sequence opens with a description of Hampstead,

Figure 3 Sociable sonnets, from the contents pages of Hunt’s Foliage (1818).

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where Hunt repaired after release from prison, and where all the figures addressed in the poems gathered for intellectual exchange, poetry writing, music making and merriment. Some poems celebrate particular moments, the sonnet ‘To Henry Robertson, John Gattie, and Vincent Novello, Not Keeping Their Appointed Hour’, for example, or the two sonnets on the infamous moment when Keats and Hunt crowned one another with ivy. A third poem to Keats invokes a member of the circle not given his own poem, Charles Cowden Clarke, and responds to Keats’s sonnet dedicating his 1817 volume to Hunt. This interactive, instantaneous intertextuality is also found in ‘To John Hamilton Reynolds, On His Lines Upon the Story of Rimini’, where Hunt answers Reynolds’s sonnet on his own poem. Sonnets to Milton, Raphael and Kosciusko announce shared heroes; others proclaim collective values, as when, in the sonnet To Horatio Smith’, Hunt praises Smith for bringing nature’s ‘sweet wisdom’ even ‘where gain huddles it’s noisiest rout’ (ll. 12–13, sic): Hunt’s financier-poet is able to escape the dominant cash nexus, what Hunt calls in the preface the ‘yellow atmosphere of moneygetting’ (p. 19). Or, again, the two sonnets to Shelley, subtitled ‘On the Degrading Notions of Deity’, advance ideas on religion which Hunt was then discussing with Keats, Godwin, Hazlitt and Shelley, and disputing with Haydon. The social nature of Cockney poetry is also revealed in the sonnets produced in Hunt’s often ridiculed poetry contests. At least two poems in Foliage arose from such companionable competition, ‘To the Grasshopper and the Cricket’ with Keats, and ‘On the Nile’ with Keats and Shelley. These contests sprang out of conversations, when the poets would agree to write to the topic in a given period of time, usually fifteen minutes; the poems would then be read aloud to the group, a moment Keats memorialised in ‘Sleep and Poetry’, when he recalled ‘The silence when some rhymes are coming out;/And when they’re come, the very pleasant rout’ (ll. 21–2). Sometimes appearing in print together,8 such poems immediately announced the group’s collective efforts. Even when published apart, they draw the reader from, say, the poem on the grasshopper and the cricket in Hunt’s Foliage to the linked poem in Keats’s Poems, weaving the group back together, inviting the reader to recreate at the level of the texts the artistic exchanges these writers had lived. Taken together, the sonnets in Foliage recreate the people, settings and ideas that comprised the Cockney School; they do not record private preferences, but shared commitments. A number of the ‘Epistles’ in the volume, like those in Keats’s Poems, continue this effort. There are poems to Hazlitt, Hunt’s fellow at the round table, ‘whose tact intellectual is such /That it seems to feel truth, as one’s fingers do touch’ (ll. 1–2); to Field, ‘my old friend’, ‘Who cheered my fire-side when we grew up together,/ And still warm my heart in these times and this weather’ (ll. 1, 3–4); and to Lamb, ‘whom old Homer would call, were he living, /Home-liver, thought-feeder, abundant-joke-giving’ (ll. 1–2). The poems celebrate visits

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together, eating, listening to music, walking Hampstead Heath, talking poetry and politics; the epistle to Hazlitt in particular imagines a day spent in moving from one Huntian pleasure to the next (ll. 30–53). While offering a pleasant, informal sociality, these poems also target some figures for satiric rebuke. William Gifford, the subject of Hunt’s later satire UltraCrepidarius, is here an urban insect who can make no more sense of poetry than a bee walking across Hunt’s page. Southey is an apostate who ‘though changing his whim,/Would still have your living take pattern by him’. And there is a host of shopkeepers, a politician, a preacher and a prude—all of them jog-trotting’ dullards who condemn the free-living and freethinking of the Cockneys.9 In announcing both allegiances and oppositions, Hunt is doing more than staking out aesthetic turf. The Preface makes clear that he wishes to invoke a way of life as well as a mode of writing. As he puts it, I may as well insinuate, that the luxuries which poets recommend, and which are thought so beautiful on paper, are much more within the reach of every one, and much more beautiful in reality, than people’s fondness for considering all poetry as fiction would imply. The poets only do with their imaginations what all might do with their practice,— live at as cheap, natural, easy, and truly pleasurable rate as possible; for it is not industry, but a defeat of the ends of it, and a mere want of ideas, to work and trouble themselves so much as most of our countrymen do; neither is it taste, but an ostentatious want of it, that is expensive. (pp. 18–19) Hunt’s poems are designed to do more than evoke imaginative locales; they seek to provoke us into new practice, to argue we should adopt what we might see as a counter-cultural lifestyle devoted to free nature, a liberated community and imaginative freedom. He is suggesting that his readers dropout of an economy devoted to an oppressive work ethic and the ‘yellow atmosphere of money-getting’ (p. 19) and embrace a life of nature and the imagination ‘natural, easy, and truly pleasurable’. In the volume, Hunt offers his own circle as a prefiguration of a world freed from the shackles of bigotry, the cash nexus and sexual repression. The other recipients of Hunt’s epistles, Thomas Moore and Byron, might seem odd partners in such a Cockney counter-cultural project. In these poems, Hunt seeks to form a coalition with two poets who were not part of his immediate circle, but allied to it politically. They comprise an unlikely trio, yet Hazlitt pairs Moore and Hunt in The Spirit of the Age as resembling each other ‘in the cast of…mind and in political principle’.10 Hunt argues in the preface to Foliage that Moore in Lalla Rookh and Byron, presumably in Childe Harold III which he praised in the Young Poets’ review, have, despite quite different poetics, embraced key tenets of his

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new school (p. 14). Shelley brought all three together as the only clearly identifiable mourners over the body of Adonais (ll. 264–70, 307–15), appearing there not so much out of sympathy with Keats’s poetry (only Hunt was a defender) but instead as liberal poets set against the conservative reviewers who have killed Adonais. Byron, Hunt and Moore were satirists for the literate left, as Howard Mumford Jones notes in grouping them together as ‘the light cavalry of the Whig assault’ upon the Regent and his government.11 Byron wrote in 1812 such pieces as ‘Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill’ and ‘Windsor Poetics’; Hunt used mostly prose for his attacks, but also wrote ‘Politics and Poetics’ (1811) and a satire ‘On the New Poet Laureate’ (E, 2 January 1814). Moore contributed his Intercepted Letters or The Twopenny Post Bag (1813) under the pseudonym of Thomas Brown’. The Letters, with their sequel The Fudge Family in Paris, published the same year as Foliage, targeted reactionary politics in England and abroad. Predictably, Moore faced Tory counterattacks, comparable to contemporary Tory debunkings of Keats’.12 These men knew each other in life. Moore and Byron were, of course, close friends. Moore had known Hunt since he praised Moore’s poetry in The Feast of the Poets (1811). Byron had strong, if sometimes troubled ties to Hunt early and late, both during Hunt’s years in prison and when they collaborated on The Liberal. Hunt was, in particular, a friend to both men when they most needed it: Byron noted that during his struggles with his wife, ‘When party feeling ran highest against me, Hunt was the only editor of a paper, the only literary man, who dared say a word in my justification …I shall always be grateful to him for the part he took on that occasion’;13 when in 1819 Moore found himself ruinously in debt, Hunt tried to organise a subscription to support him, offering to sell his own beloved piano to make a contribution. 14 There are a number of occasions where these poets signalled their alliances in print. Praised by Hunt in verse, Moore included in Intercepted Letters a tribute to Hunt and his brother John for braving prison in defence of their political views. Hunt’s epistles are a return tribute, published initially in the Examiner as imitations of Moore’s Thomas Brown’ poems: Hunt takes on the persona of ‘Harry Brown’, writing several letters by ‘Harry Brown to his Cousin Thomas Brown, Jun.’ and then ‘Harry Brown’s Letters to his Friends’.15 The most famous occasion that brought Moore and Byron together with Hunt was their visit to ‘the wit in the dungeon’. This was a moment taken up by Byron in an occasional piece which refers to Moore’s satiric letters, and draws upon Catullus to link the poets as opponents of oppression: Oh you, who in all names can tickle the town, Anacreon, Tom Little, Tom Moore, or Tom Brown, For hang me if I know of which you may most brag, Your Quarto two-pounds, or your Two-penny Post Bag;

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… But now to my letter—to yours ‘tis an answer— To-morrow be with me, as soon as you can, sir All ready and dress’d for proceeding to sponge on (According to compact) the wit in the dungeon— Pray Phoebus at length our political malice May not get us lodgings within the same palace! … But to-morrow, at four, we will both play the Scurra, And you’ll be Catullus, the Regent Mamurra (1–10, 14–15)16 While hoping that they will not be subjected to a similar punishment for their verse, Byron jokes that to visit Hunt they must ‘play the Scurra’, that is, satirical dandies, with Moore taking the part of Catullus and the Regent the role of Mamurra. Mamurra is described by Catullus as squandering the spoils of Caesar’s conquest of Britain and servicing Caesar’s diseased sexual appetites.17 In Byron’s poem, the three poets who dare defy a Regent dedicated to selfindulgence and the spoliation of England come together in a coterie of satirical men-about-town modelled on that of Catullus and his fellow ‘neoteric’ or new poets, who had opposed the powers-that-were in Rome. In his epistles to Moore and to Byron, Hunt recalls their kindness in visiting him in jail. Moore is invited into his circle at Hampstead: a lyric and satiric poet much like Hunt himself, Moore is imagined as a bee, ‘A maker of sweets, busy, sparkling, and singing,/Yet armed with an exquisite point for stinging’ (‘To Thomas Moore’, ll. 3–4). Byron, in 1816 preparing to depart for Europe, is addressed as an old friend, much to the horror of Blackwood’s. The epistle to Byron combines praise of the noble poet with an attempt to connect him with key values of Hunt’s circle. Hunt links Byron, then about to ‘taste the far-eyed freedom of the main’ and headed for ‘classic seas’, with the spirit of freedom and pagan joy that suffuses the whole of Foliage (ll. 2, 4). Imagining sea nymphs rising to ‘hail the laurelled Bard, that goes careering by’ (1. 31), Hunt recalls ‘The Nymphs’—which begins Foliage—and in so doing, as we shall see, associates Byron with that poem’s erotic myth-making. Byron’s voyage towards Italy and Greece also provides Hunt with an opportunity to repeat his argument, from his Preface and ‘Young Poets’ review, that a new school of poetry will arise not through imitation of the Latin literature praised by the Augustans but by a turn to classical Greece and Renaissance Italy, ‘Enchantress Italy…born again/In Gothic fires’. As the Italy of Dante and Boccaccio replaced the Rome of Horace, so the ‘four great Masters of our Song’—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and presumably, Byron—become great through an engagement with Italian literature (ll. 34–5, 64). Hunt modifies the received pattern of cultural history, replacing the line from Greece to Rome, neoclassical France and

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England with a different one that moves from Greece to Renaissance Italy to England, so linking three cultures dedicated to imaginative poetry and political liberty. Turning to more personal matters, Hunt speaks of why Byron was ‘dear to [him]/For many a cause’: for ‘unconscious sympathy’, for visiting him in prison, for shared friends, and ‘for a rank worn simply’ (ll. 106–16). And with this heartfelt tribute, Hunt bids Byron ‘adieu’.18 These Cockney epistles are, then, not simply tokens of friendship or admiration, but statements of artistic and ideological solidarity—as can be seen most clearly in the dedication of Foliage to John Edward Swinburne, grandfather of Algernon Charles, friend of Mirabeau and John Wilkes and, as an MP, a defender of the Hunt brothers and a visitor to Hunt’s cell. Blackwood’s Magazine was angered by Hunt’s dedication of The Story of Rimini to Lord Byron, and no less upset by this gesture to Sir John Swinburne: it is ‘a gross public insult, not to [Swinburne] alone, but to the countrygentleman of England’.19 Blackwood’s is concerned not only with Hunt’s plebeian presumption in addressing a gentleman, but also with the argument of the dedication. Swinburne is praised as a man whose religious beliefs do not lead him to ‘pay the strange compliment to heaven of depreciating this world’; who glories in the human wisdom of ancient and modern authors; who believes women should receive education; and who delights in both nature and pagan culture, as he decorates his house with flowers and a Phidian Jupiter. In this ‘war and money-injured land’, Swinburne is ‘an example to the once cheerful gentry’ in his simple, secular care of the sick and imprisoned. Swinburne stands as someone who understands the two key values espoused by this volume, ‘nature out of doors, and…sociality within’ (pp. 8–9). While this may seem a tame slogan around which to rally, the virulent responses of conservative critics suggest its power to disturb. Blackwood’s found Foliage marked by ‘licentiousness, sedition, and impiety’; The Eclectic Review agreed, deploring Hunt’s embrace of the ‘creed of the heathen and the morals of a libertine’.20 The Quarterly Review used the publication of Foliage, and particularly its sonnet to Shelley ‘On the Degrading Notions of Deity’, to attack the cultural identity of the group as a whole. The Quarterly argues that the Cockneys are engaged in a ‘systematic revival of Epicureanism’, ‘both speculatively and practically’: Lucretius is the philosopher whom these men profess most to admire, and their leading tenet is, that the enjoyment of the pleasures of intellect and sense is not to be considered as the permitted, and regulated use of God’s blessings, but the great object, and duty of life.21 Here and elsewhere the Cockneys are accused of embracing pagan materialism. Hunt and his circle are understood to believe that the

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natural and human or social realms are enough, that we can lift the burthen of this mystery and see into the life of things without reference to God. It is important to note that the Quarterly sees the Cockneys as both speculative and practical. That is, they are concerned with the intellectual claims made by, say, Hunt’s preface to Foliage or Shelley’s Revolt of Islam (which Hunt in his review of the poem linked to Lucretius) and the kind of life Hunt evokes in his dedication and in the poems themselves. Reading translations of the classics, decorating one’s room with flowers and a bust of Jupiter, taking pleasure in nature or in music are not seen as innocent activities but as an attempt to arrive at a secular, humanistic mode of life. As Keats writes in a letter to Benjamin Bailey (3 November 1817, LJK, I: p. 179), what they want is ‘a recourse somewhat human independent of the great Consolations of Religion’; or, again, in his extended experiment in Cockney classicism, Endymion, he sings of ‘A thing of beauty’ which offers ‘A flowery band to bind us to the earth,/ Spite of despondence’ (ll. 1, 7–8). It is against ‘despondence’, in particular, that Foliage is directed. The ‘Preface’ bears the subtitle ‘Cursory Observations on Poetry and Cheerfulness’: often taken as an example of Hunt’s dilettantish attitude towards poetry, recent enquiries have enabled us to see how Hunt’s turn to cheerful sociality in this preface is in keeping with a broader agenda of social and political reform.22 ‘Cheerfulness’, in Hunt’s argument, comes to include a number of potentially radical stances: a pagan embrace of earthly life, rather than despair at our existence in a fallen world; an affirmation of community in a society that increasingly exalted individualism and ‘moneygetting’; and an effort—after the failure of the French Revolution and the fall of Napoleon—to keep alive the hope of social change. Faced with disillusion and despair among the reformers, and with an unrelentingly conservative government in power, Hunt argues that sociality, solidarity, cheerfulness and hope are vital rallying points. Conservative critics understood how Hunt’s poetry set out to challenge political, religious and sexual hierarchies. Hunt notes that the recovery of early English literature and the work of the Lake School contributed to the Cockney cultural endeavour, but is unequivocal in defining his poetry as, first and foremost, a response to ‘the political convulsions of the world’. ‘[I]n the first instance’, it is the French Revolution and its aftermath that have given rise to a new poetry (Foliage, p. 10). The creation of a new school of poetry after the ‘downfall of the French School’ (Foliage, p. 9), which Hunt had already adumbrated in his ‘Young Poets’ review, is, then, in part a political action, an attempt to wrest culture from the hands of an aristocratic elite: ‘The notions about poetry can no longer be controuled, like the fashions, by a coterie of town gentlemen’ (p. 12). Moreover, this poetry is set against a version of Christianity that denigrates the pleasures of this life in order to celebrate another:

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Shall we never have done with begging the question against enjoyment, and denying or doubting the earthly possibility of the only end of virtue itself, with a dreary wilfulness that prevents our obtaining it?… The depreciators of this world,—the involuntary blasphemers of Nature’s goodness,—have tried melancholy and partial systems enough, and talked enough of their own humility. It is high time for them and for all of us, to look after health and sociality; and to believe, that although we cannot alter the world with an ipse dixit, we need not become desponding, nor mistake a disappointed egotism for humility. We should consider ourselves as what we really are,—creatures made to enjoy more than to know, to know infinitely nevertheless in proportion as we enjoy kindly, and finally, to put our own shoulders to the wheel and get out of the mud upon the green sward again, like the waggoner whom Jupiter admonishes in the fable. (Foliage, pp. 15–16) The turn here to a classical rather than Biblical parable, the praise of ‘health and sociality’, the equation of religious despair with a kind of egotistical sublime, and the embrace of pleasurable enjoyment are all hallmarks of Hunt’s poetry and of the circle’s work taken altogether. We need only think of Keats’s ‘Sleep and Poetry’, with its call for a poetry that ‘should be a friend/To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man’ (ll. 246–7) or Horace Smith’s espousal in Amarynthus, the Nympholept of ‘social mirth,/And unpolluted human happiness’ (I, i). If Hunt’s political writings in the Examiner are aimed at liberating the people from tyrannical and exploitative political and economic powers, his poetry seeks to unlock the ‘mind forg’d manacles’ that also oppress. To see such cultural work as dilettantish is, it seems to me, to deny that altering cultural forms is important in changing the world. Hunt most fully explores the ideas set forth in his ‘Preface’ in his poem ‘The Nymphs’, which opens Foliage. This attempt to create a ‘Cockney classicism’ is bolstered by Hunt’s translations which comprise the second part of the volume, the section entitled ‘Evergreens’. In seeking to democratise the classics (for Blackwood’s the private preserve of gentlemen who had Greek and Latin), Hunt offers English versions of Homer, of Theocritus, whose pastoral, communal poetry echoes throughout the circle, of Bion and Moschus, upon whom Shelley draws in Adonais, and of Anacreon, popularised earlier by Moore. The volume ends with two of Catullus’s longer poems. The first, ‘Atys’, is about a man’s decision to castrate himself while in the throes of religious ecstasy surrounding the worship of Cybele. In his Preface Hunt calls this ‘one of the most striking lessons ever thrown out against a gloomy and ascetic enthusiasm’ (Foliage, p. 34). Foliage closes with ‘The Nuptial Song of Julia and Manlius’, a ‘refreshing’ celebration of sexuality. Not only do these poems evoke Catullus, whom I have argued elsewhere is a kind of patron poet for the Cockneys,23 they also

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conclude the volume by reiterating its contrast between life-denying religion and the liberating power of the erotic. Having discovered these values in his classic precursor, Catullus, Hunt seeks to offer them as well in the classicising poem with which he begins Foliage. If Hunt has been overlooked in modern studies of Romanticism, The Nymphs’ has been ignored even by the few who have taken the trouble to read his poems.24 This is the more surprising in that the poem opens the key volume published by Hunt during the heyday of his interactions with Keats and Shelley. We may remember Byron’s travesty of Hunt’s poem, but we should also recall Keats’s interest in it: ‘Mr. H has got a great way into a Poem on the Nymphs and has said a number of beautiful things’ (to C.C.Clarke, 25 March 1817; LJK, I: pp. 126–7). Shelley also praised it: ‘What a delightful poem the ‘Nymphs’ is! especially the second part. It is truly poetical, in the intense and emphatic sense of the word’ (to Hunt, 22 March 1818; SL, II: pp. 2–3). Shelley would later praise it as ‘intensely and perfectly a poem’, its imaginative intensity appearing in the second part where Hunt creates his own myth in summoning-up previously unknown nymphs called the Nepheliads (to Hunt, 14–18 November 1819; SL, II: p. 152). 25 As Elizabeth Kent, his sister-in-law put it, ‘This poet was the first and has hitherto been the only mortal, who has been honoured with the sight of the Nepheliads in person.’26 In offering a verse catalogue of nymphs, Hunt refers to a tradition that stretches back through Akenside’s Hymn to the Naiads (1758), Drayton’s Muses Elizium (divided into ‘Nimphalls’; 1630) and Boccaccio’s Nymphs of Fiesole (ca. 1346–8) to Ovid (quoted in the epigraph). What is fresh in ‘The Nymphs’ is a distinctively Cockney fascination with nympholeptic poetry. Horace Smith’s Amarynthus, the Nympholept announces this engagement in its title, but one can add such poems as Peacock’s Rhododaphne,27 Reynolds’s Naiad, Keats’s I stood tiptoe upon a little hill’, and even the passage in Byron’s Childe Harold IV with its account of Numa’s ‘nympholepsy’ when he becomes enamoured of the nymph Egeria (see stanzas 115–26),28 This interest in nympholepsy did not end with the Cockneys: A.C. Swinburne, grandson of Sir John, also wrote a poem called ‘A Nympholept’, and we can find nympholeptic imagery throughout Victorian paintings of and books about children, fairies, water-babies and the like. Hunt’s ‘The Nymphs’ forms part of the collective work of the Cockney School, like the verse epistles to friends and the sonnet-contest poems. In fact, ‘The Nymphs’ may have been part of a contest to write a longer poem. Thomas Medwin, in his life of Shelley, claims that ‘Shelley told me that he and Keats had mutually agreed, in the same given time, (six months each) to write a long poem, and that the Endymion and Revolt of Islam were the fruits of this rivalry’.29 Edmund Blunden argued that ‘The Nymphs’, written at the same time as Keats’s and Shelley’s poems, was also part of this competition, and other scholars have added Reynolds’ ‘Romance of Youth’ and Peacock’s Rhododaphne.30 Whether or not an actual

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contest was involved, the group was writing collectively and sharing with one another a gathering of poems most of which dealt with classical myth. The impetus for this turn to myth was, I believe, Wordsworth’s Excursion and its treatment of myth in Book IV.31 The Excursion was Wordsworth’s major poem for the second generation Romantic poets. Hazlitt reviewed it in the Examiner (21 and 28 August 1814), and Hunt reread it in autumn 1816. Wordsworth places his account of world myth in Book IV where the Solitary’s interlocutors attempt to wean him from the ‘despondency’ that has arisen from his ‘Disappointment from the French Revolution’ and his subsequent ‘loss of confidence in social man’ (1. 261). Having come to believe social action futile, the Solitary is urged to turn to nature and through it to discover God. In a section labelled ‘Superstition better than apathy’, Wordsworth suggests that world mythology has been a flawed but valuable effort to perceive the divine in nature, and Greek myth is thus one partial recognition of this natural supernaturalism: In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched On the soft grass through half a summer’s day, With music lulled his indolent repose: And, in some fit of weariness, if he, When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched, Even from the blazing chariot of the sun, A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute, And filled the illumined groves with ravishment. (ll. 851–60)32 Wordsworth offers here a culturally specific example of his own mythopoetic response to the natural world. The interchange with nature and nature’s God provides a true community as opposed to what the Solitary and his interlocutors now see as the false solidarity promised by revolutionary fraternity. While the Hunt circle certainly admired the Excursion—and widely imitated it in poems from Childe Harold III to Amarynthus, the Nympholept— they rejected its vision. Their response may not always have been as harsh as Mary Shelley’s comment on its author—‘he is a slave’33—but they did find in the poem a reactionary vision of society and culture akin to Coleridge’s Lay Sermons and Southey’s The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo. In Foliage, the first sonnet on receiving a lock of Milton’s hair laments Wordsworth’s apostasy: ‘there is one, whom had he kept his art/For Freedom still, nor left her for the crew/Of lucky slaves in his misgiving heart,/I would have begged thy leave to give it to’ (ll. 10–13).34 In contrast with, if not in outright opposition to the Lake School,35 Hunt and his circle sought to offer a different account of the place of nature in human experience than that

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found in Wordsworth’s Excursion. In the face of Wordsworth’s ‘loss of faith in social man’ they set out to revivify sociality and community, and to liberate the imagination from what they saw as the Lakers’ curtailment of its powers. As Hunt puts it in his Preface, poetry arises from ‘sensativeness to the beauty of the external world, to the unsophisticated impulses of our nature, and above all, imagination, or the power to see, with verisimilitude, what others do not’ (Foliage, p. 13). There is no doubt that Hunt, Keats and Shelley alike learned much from Wordsworth when they turned to depicting nature; there is also no difficulty in discerning the difference between their landscapes and his. Simply put, the Cockneys sexualise chaste Wordsworthian nature. Where he offers spare, primordial landscapes, they provide luxurious ones. The extravagance of Keats’s and Hunt’s descriptions was attacked in The British Critic as ‘the gross slang of voluptuousness’; for Blackwood’s ‘Mr Hunt’s “love of the country”…all hangs on one great principle—every grove has its nymph.36 Blackwood’s particularly objects to a passage in the second part, which Z describes as ‘a sketch of part of [Hunt’s] seraglio’, in which we see a series of nymphs riding clouds: one only shewed On the far side a foot and leg, that glowed Under the cloud; a sweeping back another, Turning her from us like a suckling mother; She next, a side, lifting her arms to tie Her locks into a flowing knot; and she That followed her, a smooth down-arching thigh Tapering with tremulous mass internally. (II: 69–76) This eroticised nature is also found in Keats’s poems such as ‘I stood tiptoe upon a little hill’ and Endymion, Shelley’s ‘Alastor’, Peacock’s Rhododaphne and Smith’s Amarynthus, the Nympholept. All of these poems explore the need to cultivate a responsiveness to nature that includes erotic human contact. Throughout the Preface, Hunt identifies ‘the unsophisticated impulses of our nature’—that is human, rather than external nature—as a ‘love of sociality’ (Foliage, p. 18). In a passage on Thomas Browne, Hunt connects this with natural sexual impulses, praising ‘all the sentiment and social tenderness which a right sense of the sexual intercourse is calculated to produce’ (Foliage, p. 28). As Hunt pursues various groups of nymphs in his poem, finally to be kissed by his Nepheliads, social contact or ‘social glee’ as he calls it here (1. 8) is also clearly sexualised (as Elizabeth Jones points out in her chapter ‘Suburb Sinners’, p. 82, some passages of ‘The Nymphs’ might read as a description of a brothel). The erotic is seen to fasten multiple social bonds, and is thus an expression of a political standpoint; so, for Shelley as for Hunt, ‘[e]roticism…is the imagination’s last line of human resistance

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against what he elsewhere called “Anarchy”: political despotism and moral righteousness on the one hand, and on the other, selfishness, calculation, and social indifference’.37 In Hunt’s erotic imagination, nympholepsy becomes a way of curing Wordsworthian despondency. The term ‘nympholepsy’ had fairly wide usage in the period, as the OED shows. Nympholepsy proper was supposedly inspired by a nymph; as Horace Smith puts it in the preface to his play, [t]he Nympholepts of the Greeks…were men supposed to be possessed by the Nymphs, and driven to phrensy, either from having seen one of those mysterious beings, or from the maddening effect of the oracular caves in which they resided. (‘Preface’, p. v) By extension it came to identify an ecstasy or frenzy inspired by something intangible. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for example, wrote that ‘We are all nympholepts in running after our ideals’. Bulwer Lytton in Godolphin argued that ‘[t]he most common disease to genius is nympholepsy—the saddening for a spirit that the world knows not.’38 In other words, nympholepsy expresses a yearning for the ideal, a yearning which troubles Wordsworth’s Solitary and all those affected with mal du siècle. Of course, Hunt and his circle were aware of another register in which the word ‘nymph’ was deployed. In his sonnet to Smith in Foliage, Hunt refers to the ‘noon-day nymphs’ of city squares (1. 9). In a letter to Peacock (16 August 1818, SL, II: p. 29), Shelley invents his own nymph, a ‘Poliad’ or nymph of the polis. While they may have been referring to fashionable women about town (in France under the Directory, ‘nymph’ was a term for a fashionable woman), they were surely also aware of other expressions such as ‘Nymphs of the pave’, slang for street-walkers. A key mark of the poetry of the Hunt circle, and one that most troubled its conservative critics, was that it evoked all of these registers—the sublime with the profane, the ideal with the erotically real, the language of the classics with street slang. It is in recalling the erotic ground of nympholepsy, in suggesting that a longing for the absolute Other is a displacement of a desire for another human being, that the Hunt circle can offer an eroticised imagination as the cure for despondency. According to Shelley, nympholepsy was ‘a sweet disease; but one as obstinate and dangerous as any’ (SL, II: p. 29); it offered Hunt and his circle a means through which to analyse the powers and dangers of the imagination. In his 1814 review of the Excursion, Hazlitt worried that Wordsworth’s selfinvolved imagination ‘must check the genial expansion of the moral sentiments and social affections’ in seeking ‘to suspend the animal functions, and relax the bodily frame’.39 This early critique of what Keats would call ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’ has many echoes in the work of

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the Hunt circle: Keats’s cry ‘O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!’ (letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817, LJK, I: p. 185); Mary Shelley’s portrait of Victor Frankenstein as someone who allowed an obsession for knowledge to replace his affection for and responsibility towards other people; Byron’s description of Juan turning Lake Poet when— incapable of understanding his sexual desire for Donna Julia—he instead embraces a love of rocks and stones and trees (I, stanzas 90–91); Percy Shelley’s depiction of the Laker’s Peter Bell as a ‘moral eunuch’ who ‘Felt faint’ when ‘He touched the hem of Nature’s shift’ (ll. 314–16). In Hazlitt’s view, Wordsworth’s desexualised imagination posits a depopulated world, where self and object, consciousness and nature meet without the benefit of or concern for social interaction. Whereas in Hunt’s nymph-filled nature, love of nature leads to erotic love of other human beings, the Cockneys find that Wordsworth’s stark confrontation of self and nature leads away from the social and towards the supernatural. The eroticised imagination of Hunt and the other Cockneys works, as Hazlitt would put it, to re-energise the ‘animal functions’ so as to awaken the ‘social affections’ and thus, as Keats puts it, ‘bind us to the earth’. Pursuing this turn from otherworldly visions to embrace earthly life, ‘The Nymphs’ opens with a celebration of an imagination that rejects ‘Bigotry’ and ‘false Philosophy’ (ll. 4, 5) in order to delight in the pagan, the sensual, and the sexual as the ground of the convivial, of ‘social glee’ (1. 9).40 Hunt’s muse, endowed with the vision of a kind of organised innocence as it sees ‘with finer eyes, what infants see’ (1. 2), helps him find a ‘lovely land,/Where I may feel me, as I please’ (ll. 13–14). This is a typical Cockney line, transforming a simple expression, ‘Where I may feel’ into the more disconcerting ‘Where I may feel me’. The doubling and tripling of the first person serve to exert pressure on ‘feel’, a word which is repeated throughout the passage. This muse is capable of ‘feeling all lovely truth’, for its truth is beauty, beauty truth, unlike ‘false Philosophy’ with its ‘blind feel’ unable to connect to the glories of the world.41 Again, as throughout Keats’s poetry, proper poetic vision is linked to a sense of bodily vitality, here ‘the wise health of everlasting youth’ contrasted with the ‘sick eye’ of Bigotry (ll. 4–5). Hunt, like Keats, seeks imaginative experience in the body, to find that vision comes not by leaving bodily experience behind when ‘we are laid asleep/In body, and become a living soul’. Instead, Hunt’s nymphic muse is the appropriate one for a poem that ultimately finds accession to the divine in and through erotic feeling and experience. Nymphs occupied a curious middle ground in classical mythology.42 They were minor divinities, but, as Pausanias noted, some ancient poets suggested that they were not immortal, though certainly seeming so in comparison to the shortness of human existence. For some, nymphs were semi-deified mortals, and Hunt, calling nymphs the ‘finer people of the earth’, imagines that they may be the ‘souls/Of poets and poetic women’ (ll. 37, 33–4). For others, nymphs were tied to nature. Godwin, writing as

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Edward Baldwin in The Pantheon, argues that woodland nymphs personify ‘the principle of vegetable life which appears and flourishes so wonderfully in trees’ (p. 95), but there were also celestial nymphs who guided the stars and thus the lives of men (p. 97). Nymphs received sacrifices but, significantly, their preferred offerings were milk, oil, honey and wine, what Godwin calls ‘an inferior species of sacrifice’ (p. 93) and not the animals desired of the greater gods. This rejection of blood sacrifice most likely appealed to the Cockneys who were interested, particularly through Shelley’s influence, in vegetarianism.43 Uniting human desire with natural beauty and imaginative prophecy of a world not yet created, nymphs for Hunt embody an imagination that exalts but does not leave behind the earthly and the human. It is significant that Hunt, in borrowing his catalogue of nymphs from such sources as Godwin or Bell’s New Pantheon, evokes all of the terrestrial nymphs but does not describe the celestial ones; instead, he invents a new category, the Nepheliads, nymphs of the clouds, who occupy a middle ground between earth and heaven. Just as for Hunt or Shelley or Keats the erotic can take us out of ourselves to glimpse what is ideal, what appears divine, in another human being, so the eroticised imagination of nympholepsy discovers a sensual heaven on earth. Hunt and the Cockneys were accused, as we have seen, of attempting to revivify Epicureanism. Keats’s friend Benjamin Bailey would object to the Cockney and nympholeptic Endymion because it espoused ‘that abominable principle of Shelley’s—that Sensual Love is the principle of things,44 Hunt’s ‘Nymphs’, and the entire Foliage volume, share the commitment to the erotic identified in these attacks. ‘The Nymphs’, as James Thompson notes, is a poem in which ‘the pleasure principle dominates’,45 but pleasure here is in touch with the real as against imaginary longings or symbolic postulations of some unseen, omnipotent ideal. It is a poem in which linguistic exuberance, a kind of textual jouissance, evokes a world of pleasure that Hunt and his circle sought to inhabit in practice. As Hunt indicates at the end of the first part of the poem, he offers a new myth dedicated to ‘the clear thrill’ of a ‘hoped age of gold’ to be created by ‘glorious lovers’ (ll. 263, 261). That is, ‘The Nymphs’ joins with Endymion, The Revolt of Islam, Amarynthus, the Nympholept and even Moore’s Lalla Rookh and Byron’s Childe Harold III as a poem of hope and love addressed to an age subject to Wordsworthian despondency. The extravagance of the Hunt circle’s responses to Wordsworth—the fantastic pagan romances of Endymion and Rhododaphne, the eastern quest poems of Shelley and Moore, even the ‘romaunt’ of Childe Harold—announces their distance from the Excursion, an attempt to open a fanciful space that defeats Wordsworth’s Christianisation of the imagination. In response to Wordsworth’s evocation of Greek myth as a culturally specific form of natural supernaturalism, Hunt creates in the Nepheliads a new myth that refuses religious allegory and a mystical escape from life in order to embrace sensuous experience: Hunt envisions a flock of clouds commanded

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by beautiful nymphs, who swoop down to offer him kisses. Hunt’s answer to Wordsworth’s subordination of myth to Christian orthodoxy is to make a new myth that cannot be read into any orthodoxy, unless imaginative freedom and pleasure constitute the orthodoxy of a Cockney ‘age of gold’ in which the eroticised imagination would enable us to bind ourselves to the earth and to one another. Foliage, espousing erotic freedom and imaginative hope, offers the Cockney school and its allies Moore and Byron as the prophets of that future paradise on earth.

Notes 1 See Jerome McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’ (1979) in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); JKCD; James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), hereafter Chandler; Cox. 2 On the latter, see Nanora Sweet, ‘“Lorenzo’s” Liverpool and “Corinne’s” Coppet: The Italianate Salon and Romantic Education’, in Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F.Gleckner (Durham, N.J.: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 244–60. 3 See for example JKCD; Kucich. 4 All quotations are from Foliage; line numbers are given in the text. The poems are reprinted but not as a volume in PWLH. 5 Autobiography, II: p. 31. 6 Field also edited an appropriately Cockney text, The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux (2 vols, London: W. Clowes, 1819); Hardy was a transported Irish pickpocket and Field includes a glossary of ‘flash’ language, the cant of criminals, at the end of the second volume. 7 Another painter, Thomas Stothard, also receives a sonnet. Stothard was a friend of Benjamin West (Hunt’s relative); he subscribed to Hunt’s Juvenilia and was acquainted with Haydon, but does not seem to have been part of the immediate Cockney School group. An exponent of Raphael and the Elgin Marbles, an illustrator of poets from Shakespeare to Milton to Rogers, he did share many tastes with the group. 8 For example, Keats’s and Hunt’s poems on the grasshopper and the cricket were published together in E (21 September 1817). 9 On Gifford, ‘To Thomas Moore’, ll. 57–8; on Southey, ‘To Barron Field’, ll. 63– 6; on other opponents of the Cockneys, ‘To William Hazlitt’, ll. 58–69. 10 Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits (1825) in Howe, XI: p. 176. 11 Howard Mumford Jones, The Harp That Once—A Chronicle of the Life of Thomas Moore (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1937), p. 140. 12 Chandler, p. 289. 13 Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J.Lovell, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 253–4. 14 Jones, Life of Thomas Moore, pp. 206–208. 15 Shelley, like Hunt, would offer literary tribute to Moore: Peter Bell the Third is

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29 30

31

Jeffrey N.Cox dedicated to Thomas Brown’, ‘the historian of the Fudges’; Hunt also appears as ‘Mr. Examiner Hunt’ and is credited with introducing the author to the Bell family. All quotations are from BPW, line numbers will be given in the text. See ‘Poem XXIX’ and ‘Poem LVII’ in Catullus, ed. G.P.Goold (2nd edn., London: Duckworth, 1989). When Hunt reminds Byron of commissions he has taken on, we get a foretaste of Keats’s ‘draught of vintage’ from the ‘Nightingale Ode’ and a glimpse of the ‘little town’ whose ‘streets for evermore/Will silent be’ from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Byron has promised to bring him a ‘flask from dark-welled Castaly’ (1. 81), a fountain on Mount Parnassus whose waters were said to offer true inspiration. Hunt goes on to exclaim of such a ‘draught’, ‘Gods! What may not come true, what dream divine,/If thus we are to drink the Delphic wine!/ Remember too elsewhere a certain town,/Whose fame, you know, Caesar will not hand down’ (ll. 82, 84–7). JKCD, pp. 121–2; see also BM (October 1819), p. 71. See BM (October 1819), p. 71; The Eclectic Review, 2nd series, X (November 1818), pp. 484–93; 485. Quarterly Review, XVIII ( January 1818), p. 327. JKCD, pp. 116–23. Cox, pp. 156–61. However, see Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (1937; reprinted New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 176–7; Edgecombe, pp. 230–2; JKCD, pp. 116–23; Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, ‘The Nymphs’, KSMB, X (1959), pp. 33–47, and James R.Thompson, Leigh Hunt (Boston: Twayne, 1977), pp. 36–9. As Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers note, Shelley based ‘The Cloud’ on Hunt’s song of the Nepheliads; SPP, p.222 n. There also appear to be echoes of Hunt’s poem in Horace Smith’s Amarynthus, the Nympholept (1821). Elizabeth Kent, Flora Domestica; or, the Portable Flower-Garden (London: Taylor & Hessey, 1823), quoted in Blunden, p. 134. Peacock apparently abandoned another ‘nympholeptic tale’ upon learning of Smith’s Amarynthus; see the letter of Shelley to Peacock, 16 August 1818, SL, II: p. 29 & n. Shelley connects Byron’s ‘beautiful stanzas…about the Nymph Egeria’ to the group’s interest in ‘nympholepsy’ in a letter to Peacock, 8 October 1818, SL, II: p. 44. Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H.Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), pp. 178–9. Edmund Blunden, ‘The Keats-Shelley Poetry Contests’, Notes and Queries, CXCIX (December 1954), p. 546. Clayton E.Hudnall, ‘John Hamilton Reynolds, James Rice and Benjmain Bailey in the Leigh Browne-Lockyer Collection’, K-SJ, XIX (1970), p. 21. Walter Edwin Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work (2 vols; 1927; reprinted New York; Burt Franklin, 1969), II: pp. 49–51. While Blunden, p. 134, traces the group’s engagement with myth to a passage in Coleridge’s translation of Wallenstein, it is, I think, more likely that it was the Excursion that concerned them. The Eclectic Review, X (November 1818), p. 487, explicitly links ‘The Nymphs’ to the section on myth in Book IV of the Excursion, and others have made links between key Cockney works of the period and Wordsworth’s epic.

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32 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). 33 Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. Paula R.Feldman and Diana ScottKilvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 25; 14 September 1814. 34 See Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 50–51. 35 See my ‘Leigh Hunt’s Cockney School: The Lakers’ “Other”’, Romanticism on the Net, 14 (May 1999). 36 See The British Critic, NS IX ( June 1818), p. 652 and BM (October 1819), p. 73. 37 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 118. 38 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, letter to Ruskin, 2 June 1855, Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Fredric Kenyon (2 vols, New York: Macmillan, 1898), II: p. 201. Edward Bulwer Lytton, Godolphin (1831; reprinted London: G.Routledge & Sons, 1903), p. 121. See also his Rienzi, The Last of the Tribunes (1825; reprinted New York: Thomas Y.Crowell & Co., 1848), p. 15, where he speaks of ‘the dreamer—the aspirant—the very nympholept of Freedom, yet of Power—of Knowledge, yet of Religion’. Rienzi is mentioned as ‘last of Romans’, possessing ‘her latest Tribune’s name’, in Childe Harold, IV, ll. 1018–26 where he is compared to Numa prior to the passage on the nymph Egeria and ‘the nympholepsy of some fond despair’ (1. 1031). Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s letter to Ruskin recalls the Byron passage, and mentions one in Thomas De Quincey’s Recollections of the Lakes; see De Quincey’s Works (16 vols, Edinburgh: A. and C.Black, 1863–72), II: p. 32, where he speaks of a young suicide who ‘languished with a sort of despairing nympholepsy after intellectual pleasures’. 39 The review appeared in E (21 and 28 August 1814) and was reprinted in The Round Table, in Howe, IV: pp. 111–24. 40 While I use the term ‘imagination’, one might want to consider this eroticised faculty as the ‘fancy’; see ‘Fancy’s Party’, another poem in Foliage, and Keats’s ‘Fancy’ from his 1820 volume. 41 It is important to note Hunt’s emphasis on ‘false’: he is not rebuking philosophy here—this is, in its own way, a philosophical poem, as both Shelley and Blunden contend—but a false system of thought. Compare Keats in his ‘negative capability’ letter (LJK, I: pp. 191–4), where he speaks of ‘the irritable reaching after fact & reason’: Keats is apparently not attacking the ‘reaching’ in itself, but the attempt to arrive at a singular fixed Truth too quickly. 42 See the articles on nymphs in John Bell, Bell’s New Pantheon (2 vols, London: J. Bell, 1790); John Lemprière, Bibliotheca Classica; or, A Classical Dictionary (London: T.Cadell, 1788); Edwin Baldwin (ie. William Godwin), The Pantheon, (4th edn, London: M.J.Godwin, 1814), pp. 93–7. Hunt wrote an essay, ‘The Nymphs of Antiquity and of the Poets’, published in A Day by the Fire; and Other Papers Hitherto Uncollected (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1870). 43 See JKCD, pp. 84–5, 134–59, and more generally Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 44 Bailey’s comment is found in KC, I: pp. 34–5. 45 Thompson, Leigh Hunt, p. 38.

5

Suburb Sinners Sex and disease in the Cockney School Elizabeth Jones

In the third of his essays on the Cockney School in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, John Lockhart—‘Z’—employs one of his favourite characterisations of Leigh Hunt’s muse to rail against the ‘voluptuous’ Story of Rimini: —our hatred and contempt of Leigh Hunt, we say, is…owing…to the odious and unnatural harlotry of his polluted muse. We were the first to brand with a burning iron the false face of this kept-mistress of a demoralizing incendiary. We tore off her gaudy veil and transparent drapery, and exhibited the painted cheeks and writhing limbs of the prostitute.1 This passage contains three points of reference that would prove most powerful in Z’s defamation of Hunt and his circle: illicit sex, disease and immorality. In his first Cockney School article, Z had begun his war against Hunt and his followers on more conventional grounds: they lacked classical education and birthright; their readership was urban and merchant class; and their scenes of nature were artificially ornamented, interiorised, local. Moreover, Z gave his attacks on class and social standing a geographical bias: much of the objectionable atmosphere of the poetry produced by the Hunt circle, Z argued, was owing to its suburban origins, and to the ways those origins affected its descriptive purity.2 On the surface, Z’s critique seems plain enough: to write natural descriptions, a poet ought either to reside in a natural landscape or be sensitive to what distinguishes natural from urban scenes. Poets should aspire to the ‘noble compositions’ of Wordsworth, with the attendant ‘virtue’ and ‘purity of thought’ that elevated his compositions.3 Z’s rhetoric, however, soon takes a less literary turn, and focuses on social and moral issues. Many of the references in Z’s articles on the Cockney School reveal that he felt threatened more by the influence and power of emerging cultural, economic and class structures than by poetic impropriety: the poets of the so-called ‘Suburban School’ epitomised all that a well-born, welleducated Tory critic feared in the mass movement towards the capitalist ideal.

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To call someone ‘suburban’ in the early nineteenth century was to apply an epithet that had accumulated at least five centuries of negative connotations. Suburban areas always housed the illicit: in fifteenthcentury England, yeomen and immigrant workers who could not gain admission to London guilds migrated outside the city centre, where guild restrictions did not apply. The suburbs thus gained a reputation for industrial licentiousness, being areas where work went on unfettered by municipal regulations. John Scattergood shows that in Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale suburban illegality also extended to religion: in the Middle Ages, suburban areas afforded the privacy for covert alchemical experimentation. Illegal workers and religious dissidents alike found havens in these fringe regions, beyond the urban authorities. ‘Around their furnaces, working among toxic fumes’, writes Scattergood, ‘the labouring alchemists appear not to belong to the urban scale of things: they seem diabolic’.4 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, suburbs were seen as ‘a perennial menace to the maintenance of law and order’.5 OED notes a seventeenth-century usage of ‘suburb’ as ‘a place of inferior, debased, and especially licentious habits of life’, citing usages by Dekker, Marmion, Davenant, Fletcher and Massinger, among others. Indeed, so closely were suburban areas identified with the brothels found in these disreputable outskirts that the term ‘suburb sinner’ was applied to seventeenth-century prostitutes. As early as the sixteenth century, then, to call a man or woman a ‘suburbanite’ was to call into question his or her sexuality, business habits, religious practices and civic allegiances. In his Tour of 1724, Defoe described the suburb of Cripplegate as a population of tanners and skinners, catgut makers, tallow melters, dealers in old clothes, receivers of stolen goods, charcoal sellers, makers of sham jewelry,…toilers in noisome trades and dishonest dealers.… Forgers of seals, of bills, of writs, professional pick-purses, sharpers and other thieves, conjurers, wizards and fortune tellers, beggars and harlots.6 Not surprisingly, such a disreputable concentration produced health problems, duly noted in John Stow’s 1603 Survey of London. It was outside the city walls that theatres, leper hospitals, ‘rookeries’ or poor tenements, and prisons were built. Land and labour were cheap, and because building was not subject to the strict regulations of London’s labour guilds, the resulting structures were often barely fit for occupation. London’s suburbs, in Stow’s account, were full of ‘small and base tenements’, ‘bowling Allies, and Dicing houses’, and served as mass burial grounds for victims of plague, poverty and execution.7 Trades that polluted the water supply—butchering, tanning and dyeing—were also banished to the suburbs, all of which created conditions for disease and plague.

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But by 1817, the year of the first Cockney School article, England’s suburban areas had undergone a kind of class purification. The country’s urban population tripled between 1750 and 1800, and prosperous middleclass citizens moved away from the overcrowded city into its margins. The physical and ideological renovation of suburban areas proved so powerful that, by the first decade of the nineteenth century, the suburbs could be looked on as a social threshold where a middle-class city tradesman could seem transformed into a country gentleman.8 Much of Z’s vitriol was directed at the social mobility associated with the suburbs, and a domestic lifestyle of luxury, abundance and comfort which seemed, to Z, akin to that of the gentry. The threat to the social order posed by the suburban lifestyle lay in its disregard for class boundaries. So, while suburban areas were being improved by developers, architects, landscape designers and builders, and being inhabited by respectable merchant-class urbanite who tended their gardens and travelled to the city to work each day, Z used the power of the suburbs’ tarnished past to fuel his diatribes against the ‘Suburban School of Poetry’. Z’s rhetoric of disease reaches fever-pitch in his third Cockney School attack: The pestilential air which Leigh Hunt breathed forth into the world to poison and corrupt has been driven stiflingly back upon himself, and he who strove to spread the infection of a loathsome licentiousness among the tender moral constitutions of the young, has been at length rewarded…by the accusation of being himself guilty of those crimes.9 By employing the rhetoric formerly used to disparage contaminated margins of the city, Z stirs deep fears. In his first Cockney School essay Z calls Hunt’s aesthetic ‘unhealthy and jaundiced’, and notes that ‘[i]ndecency seems a disease’ of Hunt’s muse. In the third of the series, Hunt has a ‘leprous crust of self-conceit’, a ‘polluted muse’. And in the ‘Letter from Z’, Hunt is assured that there ‘is not a man or a woman around us who venerates the memory of a respectable ancestry, or the interests of a yet unpolluted progeny, that will not rejoice to see your poison neutralised by the wholesome chemistry of Z’.10 The rhetoric of contamination is not limited to Z’s quarrel with Hunt. In a review of Keats’s 1817 Poems, George Felton Mathew calls Keats ‘a proud egotist of diseased feelings’ whose poetry will ‘contaminate our purity’ and ‘inoculate us with degeneracy’.11 Six months after the last Cockney School article, the London Magazine reports on a ‘literary malady’ that had flourished since 1795: The literary world, little suspecting the dangerous consequences of this distressing malady, suffered it to germinate in silence; and not until they became thoroughly convinced that the disorder was of an epidemical

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nature, did they start from their long continued lethargy. But it was then too late! The evil was incurable.12 Pollution, pestilence, infection, leprosy, jaundice and epidemic: these are the terms of a centuries-old anti-suburbanism. ‘At a time when disease was endemic’, writes suburban historian H.J.Dyos of seventeenth-century London, ‘it was not easy to prevent waves of sickness which often originated in the suburbs from invading the City itself.’13 In the same way that Z’s rhetoric of disease and contagion is intended to provoke respectable Londoners and turn them against Hunt and his circle, Z’s references to Highgate, Hampstead, St. Giles, Camberwell and Vauxhall are calculated to remind readers of the unsavoury history of particular suburban locales. The ‘King of the Cockneys’, as Z calls Hunt, wears robes ‘worthless as old rags from St. Giles’; later, Hunt’s ‘loathsome vulgarity’ is like ‘a vermined garment from St. Giles’. 14 St. Giles-intheFields, one of London’s oldest suburbs, was infamous for poor tenements, or ‘Rookeries’, so that the area had permanent associations with wretchedness; here the Great Plague of 1665 originated. The area also contained St. Giles’s Pound, St. Giles’s Hospital for lepers, a gallows, and was the location for Hogarth’s notorious (and fictitious) ‘Gin Lane’.15 Camberwell Road was a main artery through South London, an area which quadrupled in population between 1801 and 1831. Z likened Hunt’s natural descriptions to the suburban gardens lining that road, and his reference to Cockney descriptions of ‘cascades heard at Vauxhall’ associated his poetry with Vauxhall Gardens, a popular public resort from 1661 to 1859.16 ‘But Lord! what loose company was this’, Pepys noted in his diary (1668) of the New Spring Garden, as Vauxhall was then called: ‘observe how rude some of the young gallants of the town are become, to go into people’s arbors where there are not men, and almost force the women’. Wycherley, Congreve and Etherege used the New Spring Garden as a dramatic setting for illicit socialising, and in his Amusements (1700), the Tory Tom Brown noted ‘ladies that have an inclination to be private take delight in the close walks of Spring Gardens,—where both sexes meet, and mutually serve one another as guides to lose their way’.17 The decorative gardens of Hunt’s Foliage (1818) and Keats’s Poems (1817) evidently reminded Z of places like Vauxhall; like ladies who had ‘an inclination to be private’, Cockney poets delighted in sensually charged lyrical bowers and blushful dalliance, giving Z the opportunity to identify them with the ‘loose company’ of Vauxhall, with sexual impropriety and disease. Z’s most slanderous accusation extended that association, by insinuating that the Cockneys were intent upon corrupting domestic life: when Z speaks of Hunt’s ‘prostituted’ muse he transforms him into the spoiler of family life and, more broadly, of English social institutions. ‘His poetry resembles that of a man who has kept company with

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kept-mistresses’, writes Z in the first Cockney School essay.18 This line of attack extends through the next three essays: Hunt ‘prostitutes’ his muse; he ‘prostitutes his talents’; he ‘eulogize[s] prostitutes and kept-mistresses’; and he is ‘dedicated] to a licentious muse’.19 This rhetoric continues to 1828, when, in his Quarterly review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, Lockhart presents the text itself as a suburban whore or ‘suburb sinner’: ‘the little airy fopperies of its manner are like the fantastic trip and convulsive simpers of some poor worn out wanton, struggling between famine and remorse, leering through her tears’.20 In all of these ways Lockhart drew upon the disreputable reputation of London’s suburbs; as Blackwood’s critic George Croly put it in 1821, the suburbs were the ‘retreats’ of ‘Cockney dalliance’.21 Despite Hunt’s endeavours to ‘sap the foundations of civil society and of social life’, Z would uphold traditional values. ‘Let me hope that wives may continue to love their husbands’, he exhorts, and to remain faithful to their bed…—that a holier power guards the sanctity of the marriage-couch…—that execration and hatred shall for ever pursue the memory of the unprincipled adultress,… and that all low-minded and paltry men, who, in folly or wickedness, shall seek, like Leigh Hunt, to versify vice into virtue, may meet with some just infliction.22 With ‘the details of adultery and incest’ in The Story of Rimini, Z avows, ‘a deadly wound is aimed at the dearest confidences of domestic bliss’.23 Reading Hunt is tantamount to committing adultery. Whereas Jeffrey Cox’s reading of ‘The Nymphs’ emphasises the poem’s benign erotic community, (see p. 71), Hunt’s eroticism can at times seem like a fanciful description of a brothel: And tow’rds the amorous noon, when some young poet Comes there to bathe, and yet half thrills to do it, Hovering with his ripe locks, and fair light limbs, And trying with cold foot the banks and brims, They win him to the water with sweet fancies, Till in the girdling stream he pants and dances. There’s a whole bevy there in that recess Rounding from the main stream: some sleep, some dress Each other’s locks, some swim about, some sit Parting their own moist hair, or fingering it Lightly… (I: 205–15) Hunt’s attention to the preening vanity and physical indulgence of his nymphs reveals a fascination with a feminine type that Z could associate with suburban degeneracy, casting the ‘young poet’ as a degenerate

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Vauxhall loiterer with ‘a whole bevy’ of coquettes. Later in the poem, Hunt observes his nymphs more closely: Another only shewed On the far side a foot and a leg, that glowed Under the cloud; a sweeping back another… She next, a side, lifting her arms to tie Her locks into a flowing knot; and she That followed her, a smooth down-arching thigh Tapering with tremulous mass internally. Others lay partly sunk, as if in bed, Showing a white-raised bosom and dark head, And dropping out an arm. (II: 69–79) Hunt’s focus on body parts half-hidden, half-exposed reveals his scopophilic fetishism and gives the poem a distincdy clandestine feel, a voyeuristic sense that we are being allowed to view private, even illicit, exhibitions of flesh. Both Hunt’s nymphs and the oblique stationing of Keats’s figures—their sidling coyness—give the poetry of the Cockney School a sense of its having been ‘caught in the act’.24 While Hunt’s eroticism encouraged Z to take a moral high ground, the fire of Z’s rhetoric was fuelled by what appeared to be Hunt’s double life. He wrote quasi-erotic, rococo poems like The Story of Rimini (1816) and ‘The Nymphs’, and also numerous prose essays on life in London and its suburbs. Hunt was perhaps most eloquent on the pleasures of domestic existence, pleasures which, in their delight in the quotidian—indeed, in their domestic naturalness—provided a radical contrast to the ornamentation and throbbing eroticism of his narrative poems. One of the best examples of Hunt’s domestic sensibility, taken from one of his 1817 ‘Round Table’ essays, is mockingly quoted at length in the fifth Cockney School article. Hunt writes, We felt ourselves cosy and just-the-thingish;…sitting round our fire, with a friend or two after a cheerful dinner, with our feet on our fender, and our chin on our knees…our habits and feelings are domestic…we love our little fire-side with all its appendages. And then, to make all as it should be, we have pussy to frisk about us, whom we have lately decorated with a scarlet ribbon…and the singing of the tea-kettle too.25 While Hunt was offending some critics, he was delighting other readers happy to immerse themselves in the cult of domesticity celebrated in his Round Table and Indicator essays. Hunt’s fireside musings in the family home and sonnets to suburban Hampstead are warmly domestic, full of

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chatty society and various middle-class ‘appendages’ of cultural refinement. But being at home with Leigh Hunt was not like being at home with Dorothy and William Wordsworth in Grasmere, the domestic sanctuary of one tradition of English Romanticism. To understand Huntian domesticity, and to make sense of Z’s extremity, it is useful to review the principles of Regency house and garden design. The poetry of Hunt and his circle has much to tell us about the cultural ethos of emerging middle-class suburbanism as this was mediated through various poetic landscapes, and much to tell us about the domestic situation of a social class then aspiring to economic power. For, while Hunt’s critics could trace the eroticism and vulgarity of his poetry to the suburbs’ tarnished past, they would also find his work’s domesticity aligned with the ideological and cultural encroachments threatened by the burgeoning suburbs of the early nineteenth century. Hunt’s critics objected to a style and taste that appeared to vitiate picturesque principles; his landscapes were artificial, ornamented, socialised, domesticated, and reading his poetry was, according to Z, like ‘entering the gilded drawing-room of a mincing boarding-school mistress’.26 Such vitriol stemmed from an inability to understand a new aesthetic reflecting the cultural values of a rapidly growing middle class that Z and his like knew little about. If there was one thing about Hunt and Keats, besides their class and politics, that provoked Z’s most scathing remarks, it was that their imaginative worlds were located not within a natural, but a cultural landscape. Castigating their poetic style as ‘Metromanie’,27 Z invoked a High (‘Wordsworthian’) Romanticism to prove that, by contrast, Hunt and his associates were pastoral charlatans. Their flowers were grown in pots and window-boxes; the mountains they climbed were paltry suburban hills; the streams beside which they reclined were manufactured by landscape architects.28 The picturesque was an aesthetic of the gentry although, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, picturesque principles had little relevance for middle-class professionals and merchants who had escaped the overcrowded cities, where they had their businesses, to live in the suburbs. Lacking the means to become country squires, yet wealthy enough to live comfortably, they moved to the territory between the urban centre and the rural landscape (for example the Camberwell Road) where they established domestic havens on small suburban lots. This rush to the suburbs helped create a new kind of suburban landscape, and a new aesthetic, the gardenesque—an affordable alternative to the picturesque. In the gardenesque the suburban promoter John Claudius Loudon gave the middle classes an aesthetic of their own. What the picturesque was for the landed gentry, the gardenesque was for the suburbanite. For in the same way that picturesque principles found their way into some of the most widely read poetry of the period, so the principles of the

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gardenesque informed the poetry that was written and read by suburbanites like Hunt and his circle. Furthermore, while the landscapes of the picturesque had inspired philosophical and religious musings in an Enlightenment readership, the landscapes of the gardenesque promoted a domestic ideal of consumerism and acquisitiveness for a readership becoming accustomed to see things in the new light of the capitalist era. As economic power shifted to the professional middle classes, money that formerly might have gone into large-scale picturesque improvements was now being used as investment capital; what was left would be spent on improving the domestic establishment, its garden grounds, and in acquiring material tokens of cultural aspiration. The ‘Grand Tour’ aesthetic was replaced by an ‘At Home’ aesthetic, and the painterly notion of ‘landscape’ was subordinated to the utilitarian combination of house and garden. In the suburban design ideal, house and garden replaced the tracts of improved grounds with a landscape that was at once natural and cultural. Reviewing William Gilpin’s Practical Hints on Landscape Gardening in his immensely popular Gardener’s Magazine, Loudon first identified a landscape aesthetic designed exclusively for suburbanites: ‘Mere picturesque improvement is not enough in these enlightened times: it is necessary to understand that there is such a character of art as the gardenesque, as well as the picturesque’. In contrast to the picturesque, which aimed to conceal the art behind scenes displayed in a state of nature, the gardenesque, writes Loudon, is ‘calculated to display [natural objects] in a state of culture’. And unlike the picturesque of Gilpin, which shunned the presence of ‘the works of men’, the gardenesque, by London’s definition, owed its very existence to ‘the art of the gardener’, and made garden cultivation into a metaphor for self-cultivation, and ultimately for social improvement.29 What Repton, Loudon and other Regency designers were attempting was nothing less than a union of two formerly opposed states of existence— culture and nature—an alliance nicely manifest in the popular ‘house and garden’ design aesthetic. With the notion of garden cultivation, the economic aspirations of the middle classes were given a potent symbolic equivalent: improving one’s domestic situation through garden cultivation would lead, if Loudon were to be believed, to an improvement in status for a class still in its early stages of growth. Domestic poetry in the Romantic era arguably begins with Cowper, undergoes a sublimation by Wordsworth and is further transformed by Hunt and his circle. The domesticity of the Wordsworths, epitomised by Home at Grasmere and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals, is as rural, chaste and unadorned as that of the Cockneys is urban, voluptuous and ornamented. William Wordsworth, in a description of homes in his Guide through the District of the Lakes, gives a typical example of a unity achieved through the domination of cultural by natural forces:

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[B]uildings, which in their very form call to mind the processes of nature, do thus, clothed in part with a vegetable garb, appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields…30 ‘[T]hese humble dwellings’, writes Wordsworth, ‘remind the contemplative spectator of a production of nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to have been erected’.31 In the ideology of the first generation Romantics, then, wild nature reigns supreme, growing over and ultimately obscuring human works. It is necessary to understand, however, how the natural landscapes of Grasmere were transformed so radically into the cultural landscapes of Cockney poetry, where one is never sure whether one is in or out of nature. Cockney landscapes are ‘cultural’ in that while their structures are taken from traditional models of natural description, like Virgil’s embowered locus amoenus or the eighteenth-century prospect genre, they take their inspiration, and often their content, from the museum, the shop, the parlour and, ultimately, from the principles of Regency house and garden design. Picturesque principles were carried to their logical conclusions in Regency house and garden design, often resulting in a blurring of the boundaries separating landscaping from architecture. ‘Suffer the tendrils of the ivy to mantle luxuriantly over the windows’, writes Regency designer Edmund Bartell in 1804, in a conscious attempt to make the landscape a scene for living in, rather than a picture to be viewed at a distance.32 Other Regency innovations that fostered this ideal were those of the French or ‘casement’ window and the terrace or verandah, features that helped to bring house and garden together. Living rooms and parlours were thus placed at ground-level, instead of in the basement storey, giving inhabitants access to the garden through long casement windows that stretched from ceiling to floor. Conservatories, formerly placed far in the distance of a picturesque improvement, were brought in close so that they became ‘garden rooms’ opening directly off the house. And trellises provided a structural element that could be entirely obscured by foliage, allowing entranceways to be festooned with climbing plants and flowers, sometimes continuing to cover the house itself. Unlike the wild foliage growing unchecked around and over the buildings in Wordsworth’s Lake District, such natural elements were derived wholly from the garden—that most cultivated and cultured of natural spaces—and from the art of the gardener. Wentworth Place in Hampstead, which Keats shared with Charles Brown, was a typical middle-class suburban residence. Part of a speculative suburban property development, it was built in the Regency style with trellised iron-work balconies at the front windows, and casement windows connecting the back parlour to a terrace and garden. Brown gave this back room to Keats to use for writing, and this was the first time in Keats’s life that he would have experienced the luxury and privacy of middle-class

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accommodation, with his own room and attached garden.33 The importance of this situation for Keats cannot be underestimated, and it gives us a cultural reference for the reappearance, throughout Keats’s poems of this period, of a popular design feature of Regency homes. There is the ‘casement ope at night’, from the ‘Ode to Psyche’ (1. 66); the ‘Charm’d magic casements’ in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1. 69); ‘The open casement press[ing] a newleaved vine’ from the ‘Ode on Indolence’ (1. 47); and the luxuriously ‘garlanded’ ‘casement high and triple arch’d’ in The Eve of St. Agnes (1. 208).34 Loudon would also have approved of the gardenesque ‘wreath’d trellis of a working brain’—Fancy’s ‘gardener’—that dresses the ‘rosy sanctuary’ in the last lines of the ‘Ode to Psyche’ (ll. 59–60; see also Nicholas Roe’s chapter, p. 29, for Hunt and Keats’s ‘rosy sanctuary’). Perhaps empowered by the cultural security represented by the location and design of his new home, Keats enjoyed the most productive year of his life. He can be seen in his writing-room, sitting beside the large windows, in the posthumous portrait by Severn. London’s immensely popular Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion (1838) gave detailed descriptions of how the suburban dweller might attain the gardenesque style. The suburban garden was to be various, exotic, ornamented and, above all, ‘calculated to display the individual beauty of trees, shrubs, and plants in a state of culture’.35 ‘Simply’, Loudon states, let foreign trees and shrubs, or such as are totally different from the trees in the given locality, be planted, instead of indigenous trees;…a landscape so produced might have all the beauties proper to landscapes of this kind,…and yet never for one moment be mistaken for a work of nature.36 Many of Blackwood’s criticisms of Hunt’s and Keats’s verse could easily be critiques of gardenesque principles. Z particularly objects to the foreign origins of Hunt’s foliage: ‘A tree in the hands of Leigh Hunt is a very odd affair. No such tree as he is in the habit of describing grows in the British Isles’.37 Z often criticises Hunt’s natural scenes for being overly artificial and ornamented, yet ornamentation was described by Loudon as one of the ‘essential materials, or component parts, of a flower-garden’, and the domestic gardener was encouraged to make use of vases, statues, spars, and other objects of curiosity, natural or artificial; rustic baskets, vases, or other contrivances for containing plants; trelliswork, arcades for climbers, open and covered seats, summerhouses, fountains, aquariums, rockwork, rootwork, grottoes, and grotesque objects —with Loudon’s only caution being that ‘there must be a consistency in every part, with reference to culture’.38 Lines from Canto III of the Story of

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Rimini describing Francesca’s garden retreat illustrate the type of landscape Loudon had in mind: With plots of grass, and perfumed walks between Of citron, honeysuckle and jessamine, With orange, whose warm leaves so finely suit, And look as if they’d shade a golden fruit; And midst the flowers, turfed round beneath a shade Of circling pines, a babbling fountain played… So now you walked beside an odorous bed Of gorgeous hues, white, azure, golden, red; And now turned off into a leafy walk, Close and continuous, fit for lovers’ talk; And now pursued the stream, and as you trod Onward and onward o’er the velvet sod… With spots of sunny opening, and with nooks, To lie and read in, sloping into brooks… And here and there, in every part, were seats, Some in the open walks, some in retreats… A spot, that struck you like enchanted ground:— It was a shallow dell, set in a mound Of sloping shrubs, that mounted by degrees, The birch and poplar mixed with heavier trees; From under which, sent through a marble spout, Betwixt the dark wet green, a rill gushed out… The ground within was lawn, with plots of flowers Heaped towards the centre, and with citron bowers; And in the midst of all, clustered about With bay and myrtle, and just gleaming out, Lurked a pavilion,—a delicious sight, Small, marble, well-proportioned, mellowy white. (396–449) Here, as if following London’s prescription for garden design, Hunt presents nature in a state of culture. He includes all the elements of London’s suburban gardenesque (see Figure 4): flowers in plots or beds, with foliage structured into nooks and bowers; trees are exotic, ornamental; grass is manicured into ‘velvet’ lawns; the stream flows from a marble spout; there is even a ‘well-proportioned’ marble pavilion, or, in Loudon’s terms, a ‘summer-house’, with orange trees placed on either side of the door. Here, as is so often the case in Hunt’s poetry, nature is constructed with human accommodation in mind, with seats, walkways and enclosures—cultivated places, as Hunt maintained, ‘for poets made’ (Rimini III: 430). Such descriptions mark the beginning of an aesthetic that soon became the domestic goal of every suburban homeowner, and which would form

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4 The suburban gardenesque. Frontispiece to Elizabeth Kent, Flora Domestica; or, The Portable Flower-Garden (New edn, London: Whittaker, Treacher and Co., 1831). Elizabeth Kent was Leigh Hunt’s sister-in-law. Her book quoted poems by Hunt, Keats, Clare and others.

the cultural foundations of the poetic architecture of the Victorians. What strikes one most forcibly, however, is the way in which the landscapes of the Cockney School predict the future of design in the Regency period by constantly confounding our expectations of what should be inside and what outside—by blurring the boundary, as Regency designers were to do in the next two decades, between the domestic and the natural. This conflation continues in canto III of Rimini, where Hunt describes Francesca’s retreat to her garden and her liaison with Paolo, her husband’s brother. Although Hunt refers to this space as a bower, and describes Francesca as retiring ‘’midst the flowers and trees’ (520), ‘To taste of nature, primitive and free’ (527), among ‘low-talking leaves’, ‘vines’, and the ‘closing wood’, this quasi-natural space is actually the same marble pavilion referred to in the preceding gardenesque catalogue. Francesca is surrounded not by nature, but by the marble walls of this gardenesque structure and, oddly, by books. When we read the line ‘She reached o’erhead, and took her down a book’ (532), we are made aware abruptly that

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this is a cleverly disguised domestic parlour. Two lines from one of Hunt’s sonnets, quoted satirically by Z in the fifth Cockney School essay, highlight this conflation and repeat the bathetic drop we experience when Francesca pulls a book down from this ‘natural’ bower. Writing a sonnet from the top of Primrose Hill, what Z calls the ‘Cockney Parnassus’, Hunt pens the following couplet: ‘I gaze at the sky with high poetic feeling,/And liken it to a gorgeously spangled ceiling’.39 As if as a caveat to critics like Z, Hunt notes that his sonnet is written only for those readers ‘who love the moonlight stillness of the Regent’s Park’, the immensely successful gardencity that in 1810 realised the suburban dreams of Regency designer John Nash, displaying the house and garden ideal on a grand scale. Comparing the firmament to a ‘gorgeously spangled ceiling’ was typically Huntian and is a perfect example of a process of domestication that could tame such potent images of sublime nature by associating them with Regency-period design trends. In fact, Hunt is so unselfconscious of his reduction of the natural world to interior decoration that he can write the following in the Indicator for October of 1819: You may often see on no very rich mantle-piece a representative body of all the elements, physical and intellectual,—a shell for the sea, a stuffed bird or some feathers for the air, a curious piece of mineral for the earth, [and] a glass of water with some flowers in it for the visible process of creation.40 Once again, Hunt’s natural references are culturally mediated, here by the popular pastimes of taxidermy and floral arranging. While displaying the stuffed carcasses of dead birds and cut flowers in a glass of water is a peculiar way to observe ‘the visible process of creation’, Hunt was responding with the enthusiasm of a nature lover in the great age of natural history, when the study and display of ‘a representative body’ of nature was eagerly pursued. While natural history was helping to furnish middle-class homes, exploration and inexpensive travel filled the marketplace with affordable exotica on sale to a middle class eager to purchase visible tokens of their prosperity. The trades associated with furniture, draperies and interior decoration were doing brisk business in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The rose trellis wallpaper Hunt put in his prison cell was only one way the homeowner could recreate scenes of nature within four walls. Ornamentation was the mark of the Regency style’s individuality—whether in homes or gardens—and it was also the distinguishing feature of many of Hunt’s descriptive passages. Rodney Edgecombe remarks that The Story of Rimini reads as if Hunt were ‘thumbing his way through bolts of rich fabric in a warehouse’.41 The commercial image is fitting, and if it is brought to bear on much of the poetry of Hunt and his circle, the glittering clutter of their descriptions

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may be seen from the perspective of culturally aspirant poets who, although constantly beleaguered by financial woes, were eager to display the mark of middle-class arrival in their poetry. While it might seem a contradiction for Z to criticise on moral grounds one of the most domesticated of essayists, Z was consistent in his reaction to middle-class luxury and abundance and to Hunt’s forays into domestic and erotic pleasures. And while at first it may seem to be Hunt’s prurience that offended Z—the way in which he delighted in erotic imaginings—it was Hunt’s ease with abundance, his comfortable enjoyment of luxury, that threatened what Z held most dear. For Z was responding to an uneasy combination, in Hunt’s poetry and essays, of gentility and vulgarity; the combination of domestic abundance, ease, culture and society which had formerly been an élite preserve were now available to an apparently underbred dilettante who was greedy for sensual pleasures and was, in Z’s view, the author of bad poetry. Because the new suburban model of society allowed citizens to move freely up the social hierarchy through the possession of property, to its detractors the suburban lifestyle amounted to nothing more than an affectation of gentility, rather than what it was: the manifestation of the first wave of the leisured middle classes. The threat, it seems, was strong enough to force Z to sublimate his fears of class-encroachment by diverting them into the more socially acceptable— because historically precedented—fears of suburban immorality and disease. Without explicitly outlining the intricacies of his own class politics, Z could prey upon the fears of citizens, irrespective of class, who cherished the sanctity of home and family, good health and faith in God.42 By reminding his readers of suburban degeneracy—of the occultists who practised demonic magic in their suburban cellars, of the whores who roamed the streets in search of unsuspecting husbands and of the plagues that festered in the stinking streets of London’s margins—Z aimed to stem the middle-class tide represented by Hunt and his followers. Kim Wheatley has remarked that the Cockney School essays Vacillate between insisting that Hunt is a danger to society [because he] is subversive and trivializing him by picturing him in scenes of domesticity [because he] is suburban’.43 We should also remember that to be suburban in 1816—to have abundance and leisure without birthright—was in itself highly questionable: a greater danger to society, as Z knew it, than he was able or willing to admit.

Notes 1 ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. III’, BM ( July 1818), pp. 453–6, at p. 453. 2 Hunt’s villa in Hampstead’s Vale of Health was the domestic centre for Cockney School gatherings; like Charles Brown’s house in Hampstead, it served as a

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Elizabeth Jones temporary dwelling for Keats. For a summary of critical attacks on the suburbanism of Hunt and his circle, see Elizabeth Jones, ‘Keats in the Suburbs’, K-SJ, XLV (1996), pp. 23–43. Hunt, writes Z, ‘has never seen any mountain higher than Highgate-hill, nor reclined by any stream more pastoral than the Serpentine River’. ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. I’, BM (October 1817), pp. 38–48, at p. 39. John Scattergood, ‘Chaucer in the Suburbs’, Medieval Literature and Antiquities: Studies in Honour of Basil Cottle, ed. Myra Stokes and T.L.Burton (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987), pp. 145–62, at p. 157. H.J.Dyos, The Victorian Suburb: A Study of Camberwell (Edinburgh: Leicester University Press, 1969), p. 34; hereafter Dyos. In Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic, 1987), p. 7; hereafter Fishman. John Stow, A Survey of London (2 vols, 1603; reprinted Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), II: pp. 74–82. Dyos, p. 23. See also John Ruskin on mass-produced suburban houses, many of which, like Charles Brown’s at Wentworth Place, had no foundations. Ruskin compares these ‘rootless’ buildings to their transplanted inhabitants, and, like Lockhart, sees in the suburban phenomenon a symbol of a national disease: ‘I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay…upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered wood and imitation stone…with a painful forboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground: that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent’. See Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849; reprinted London: Dent, 1907), pp. 183–4. ‘Cockney School, No. III’, p. 455. ‘Cockney School, No. I’, p. 40; ‘Cockney School, No. III’, p. 453; ‘Letter from Z. to Leigh Hunt, King of the Cockneys’, BM (May 1818), pp. 196–201, at p. 201. RR,C, I: p. 424. In Newman Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth: Shelley and His Contemporary Critics (New York: Octagon, 1972), p. 172. Dyos, pp. 34–5. Ruskin offers a similar critique of suburban degradation in a letter from 1873: ‘The women and girls have no pleasures but in calling on each other in false hair, cheap dresses of gaudy stuffs, machine made, and high-heeled boots, of which the pattern was set to them by Parisian prostitutes of the lowest order: the men have no faculty beyond that of cheating in business’. See The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T.Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols, London: George Allen, 1903–12), XXVII: p. 530; hereafter Ruskin, Works. ‘Letter from Z’, p. 201; ‘Cockney School, No. III’, p. 453. Henry B.Wheadey, London Past and Present: A Dictionary of its History, Associations, and Traditions (3 vols, London: John Murray, 1891), II: pp. 110–14; hereafter Wheatley. ‘Cockney School, No. I’, p. 39; ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. IV’, BM (October 1819), pp. 519–24, at p. 521. Wheadey, III: pp. 426–7. ‘Cockney School, No. I’ p. 40. Ibid.; ‘Cockney School, No. II’, p. 201; ‘Letter from Z’, p. 198; ‘Letter from Z’, p. 199.

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20 John Gibson Lockhart, review of Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, Quarterly Review (March 1828), pp. 402–26, at p. 403. 21 RR, C, I: p. 147. 22 ‘Letter from Z’, p. 198–9. 23 ‘Cockney School, No. I’, p. 40. 24 See also Cox, pp. 168–85, for the Cockney School’s radical eroticism which Cox traces to Emma Hamilton performing classical poses, or ‘attitudes’. 25 ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. V’, BM (April 1819), pp. 97–100, at pp. 98–99. 26 ‘Cockney School, No. I’, p. 39. 27 ‘Cockney School, No. IV’, p. 521 28 Z’s critique of the Cockneys’ artificial nature runs throughout the series, but see especially his ‘Cockney School, No. I’, p. 39. 29 J.C.Loudon, Gardener’s Magazine, VIII (1832), pp. 701–2. 30 William Wordsworth, A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England (Kendal and London: Hudson and Nicholson; Longman and Co., Moxon, and Whittaker and Co., 1851), in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B.Owen and J.W.Smyser (3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) II: p. 203. 31 A Guide through the District of the Lakes, in Prose Works of William Wordsworth, II, p. 202. 32 In Donald Pilcher, The Regency Style: 1800 to 1830 (London: Batsford, 1947), p. 23. 33 Wentworth Place, like the buildings Ruskin describes (see note 8), was a speculative development. In the 1873 letter cited above (note 13), Ruskin writes, ‘That is the typical condition of five-sixths, at least, of the “rising” middle classes about London—the lodgers in those damp shells of brick, which one cannot say they inhabit, nor call their “houses”; nor “theirs” indeed, in any sense; but packing-cases in which they are temporarily stored, for bad use’. See Ruskin, Works, XXVII: p. 530. 34 All line references to Keats’s poems are to PJK. 35 J.C. Loudon, The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion, ed. John Dixon Hunt (New York: Garland, 1982), p. 160. 36 Loudon, Suburban Gardener, pp. 138–9. 37 ‘Letter from Z’, p. 198. Proof of the lasting influence of gardening practises promoted by Loudon (and of the staying power of the Blackwood’s critiques) can be found in Ruskin, who calls the suburban garden ‘an ugly thing’ and describes the profusion of rare and exotic species in it as ‘an assembly of unfortunate beings, pampered and bloated above their natural size, stewed and heated into diseased growth; corrupted by evil communication into speckled and inharmonious colours; torn from the soil which they loved and of which they were the spirit and the glory, to glare away their term of tormented life among the mixed and incongruous essences of each other, in earth that they know not, and in air that is poison to them. The florist may delight in this, the true lover of nature never will’. See The Poetry of Architecture (London: George Allen, 1893), p. 205. 38 Loudon, Suburban Gardener, p. 751. 39 ‘Cockney School, No. V’, p. 100. 40 Leigh Hunt, ‘Autumnal Commencement of Fires’, Indicator, p. 10.

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41 See Edgecombe, p. 54. 42 Z’s linking of domestic purity with religious rectitude suggests an ideological connection to the Evangelical movement, which emphasised the sanctity of home and family as an antidote to the moral depravity and consumerism taking hold of pre-Victorian lives. Like Z, the Evangelicals viewed the rise of the middle class as a threat to national morality: luxury and leisure brought them dangerously close to the higher ranks, who the Evangelicals, unlike Z, viewed as morally corrupt, and spiritually vacant. See Fishman, pp. 20–38; see also Catherine Hall, ‘The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology’, Fit Work for Women, ed. Sandra Burman (London: Croom Helm, 1979), pp. 15–32. 43 Kim Wheatley, ‘The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, XLVII (1992–3), pp. 1–31, at p. 6.

6

Leigh Hunt’s aesthetics of intimacy Jane Stabler

Leigh Hunt’s revised Feast of the Poets (1815) surveys the community of writers whose work sustained him during imprisonment in Surrey Gaol, including Moore and Byron who visited him there. Apollo advises the poets about their different modes of address: William Gifford is rejected outright because of his ‘sour’ criticism; Moore is gently mocked for his early lasciviousness; Byron is invited to turn his misanthropy to charity; Wordsworth is urged to discontinue his intimate acquaintance with the mundane, parodically exemplified by ‘Some line he had made on a straw’: Apollo half laughed betwixt anger and mirth, And cried, ‘Was there ever such trifling on earth? What! think ye a bard’s a mere gossip, who tells Of the ev’ry-day feelings of every one else, And that poetry lies, not in something select, But in gath’ring the refuse that others reject?’ (ll. 303–8)1 These lines are intriguing in that they show Hunt lambasting the versified chit-chat his own work often seems to embody. As we shall see, Hunt himself was not averse to gossip, though Wordsworth explicitly renounced the pleasures of familiar conversation. Hunt’s critique of Wordsworth in The Feast of the Poets suggests that poetry is to be above the commonplace, but not without the common touch. In the 1815 text, Byron, for example, is urged to develop ‘straight-forward speaking’ (l. 242), advice Byron directed back to Hunt when he commented on the manuscript of The Story of Rimini: Hunt wrote, Byron said, ‘as if to avoid saying common things in the common way’.2 Once the initial wrangling is over, The Feast of the Poets suggests that the greatest contribution of poetry is to impart social and aesthetic harmony: ‘Thus chatting and singing they sat till eleven,/When Phoebus shook hands, and departed for heaven’ (ll. 525–6). The poetical soirée softens (without effacing) political difference, so that although the company shows party spirit in selecting those who should be honoured they all finally unite in enjoyment of Moore’s music.

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The Feast of the Poets encapsulates the leading passions of Hunt’s life— poetry and politics. The British Critic detected in the poem ‘an affectation of the easy and the familiar style’ amounting to ‘low and vulgar flippancy’.3 The journal seized on Apollo’s advice to Scott, ‘The crown of all triumph is freedom of mind’, and observed with scathing sarcasm: If by ‘freedom of mind’ Mr. Hunt means ‘confinement of body,’ as we perceive that the dedication of his book is dated from the Surrey Jail; we must confess, that in our opinion, ‘the crown of all triumph’ is not an imprisonment for a seditious libel in the prison of Horsemonger Lane. It is not with the poetry, but with the loyalty of W.Scott, that Mr. Hunt seems most inclined to quarrel. (RR, C, I: p. 205) Here, as in numerous reviews of Hunt, poetics and politics are inseparable. The political significance of Hunt’s Hampstead coterie and its intersection with the Shelleys’ Marlow household has been much discussed.4 Building on this work, my chapter explores Hunt’s rhetoric of sociality, its ethical and aesthetic implications, its impact on the value of his poetry, and the effect of placing Hunt’s verse in a Victorian context. For the 1832 collection of his poems, Hunt set out to write ‘a good gossiping preface’.5 One of his reviewers remarked that the preface should be diligently read ‘if for no other reason than because it is written for the social purpose of cultivating the reader’s intimacy and friendship’.6 Hunt’s desire to get on with his readers stands in opposition to Lyrical Ballads, the ‘Advertisement’ and Prefaces to which became increasingly dogmatic and patronising (one might say Wordsworthian) with each new edition. While Wordsworth and Coleridge advertised the fact that they expected Lyrical Ballads to lose a good proportion of its audience before the end (‘Readers […] if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion…’), Hunt cherished his readers by name in his first volume, Juvenilia, published by subscription, and later addressed them and the dedicatees of his poetry as kindred spirits.7 We could contrast Hunt’s authorial sociability, as well, with the peevish temperament displayed in Byron’s Preface to Marino Faliero (1821): the sneering reader, and the loud critic, and the tart review, are scattered and distant calamities; but the trampling of an intelligent or of an ignorant audience on a production which, be it good or bad, has been a mental labour to the writer, is a palpable and immediate grievance.8 Indeed, despite Byron’s reputation for scandalous self-revelation, and the confessional poems of Charlotte Smith and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the 1833 review of Hunt’s poetry in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine

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could claim that ‘[n]ever did writer more confidingly lay himself, under all his whims, caprices, and impulses, more nakedly open, or more transparently veiled, before the world’.9 What was it about Hunt’s writing that prompted this sense of unprecedented intimacy with the reader, when preceding decades had been dominated by the confessional example of Rousseau? The answer may be found, I think, partly in Hunt’s sympathetic relationship with the middling class of English readers (to borrow Francis Jeffrey’s classification), deriving from a peculiar and almost unique combination of journalism and poetry. His Romantic and Victorian poetic contemporaries—Wordsworth, Hemans, LEL, Byron—made direct appeals to readers’ feelings, but did so while remaining in seclusion themselves, keeping the reader at bay in both geographical and textual senses. In 1818 John Wilson, for example, identified between Byron and the reading public ‘a stronger personal bond than…to any other living poet’, but admitted also that the aristocratic poet ‘proudly guard [s] his own prevailing character, so that it shall not merge in the waves of a common nature’.10 Byron both courted and rejected the middling class of readers who created his fame and his ignominy. For personal and ethical reasons, Hunt’s poetry did not plunge into the inner spaces of the poet’s ‘dark dream of life’ (as Wilson called it); instead, he concentrated on the hospitable spaces of domestic interiors and garden bowers, close walks and shady lanes. Hunt is one of the few Romantic writers who invites his readers to imagine taking tea with him by the fireside. This constitutes at once the strength of his journalism, and the anti-Romantic nature of his poetry. Hunt’s poetry was not ‘right-royal’ in the manner described by Hazlitt.11 Hunt’s readers do not feel, as Wilson felt with Byron, that we are the ‘sole agitated witness of the pageant of misery’, that the poetry seems to have ‘something of the nature of private and confidential communications’; Hunt’s intimacy is of a different order, and it is important to realise that, at the time, his more sociable mode proved extremely popular.12 In 1814 the Critical Review asserted that ‘an intimate intercourse with general society is essential to the poetical character’, and expressed doubts about the ‘fastidious seclusion from […] busy haunts’ and ‘the primitive feelings and associations, to which Mr. Wordsworth would exclusively confine us’.13 In alluding to personal difficulties encountered by poets such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden, this reviewer (like many others) reminded readers that Hunt had faced his share of problems too. Indeed, many reviewers were sympathetic to Hunt, regarding his imprisonment as a form of martyrdom undergone for the good of the wider community. Perhaps because he was the only one of his literary contemporaries who was actually (not metaphorically) imprisoned, Hunt hardly ever employed a gothic mode to make domestic interiors uncanny or estranged. He needed the artificial structure of homely companionship

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much more than William Wordsworth, who in his poem ‘Personal Talk’ (published 1807), explicitly rejected the sort of chatter Hunt embraced: I am not One who much or oft delight To season my fireside with personal talk, About Friends, who live within an easy walk, Or Neighbours, daily, weekly, in my sight: And, for my chance-acquaintance, Ladies bright, Sons, Mothers, Maidens withering on the stalk, These all wear out of me, like Forms with chalk Painted on rich men’s floors, for one feast-night. Better than such discourse doth silence long, Long, barren silence, square with my desire; To sit without emotion, hope, or aim, By my half-kitchen my half-parlour fire, And listen to the flapping of the flame, Or kettle, whispering it’s faint undersong. (ll. 1–14)14 It would be difficult to find a poem further from the spirit of Hunt. Wordsworth’s sense that various acquaintances ‘wear out of me, like Forms with chalk/Painted on rich men’s floors’ (ll. 7–8) conveys the poet’s weariness in society and disdain for festive gaiety. His preference for ‘Long, barren silence’ would have been a terrifying prospect for Hunt’s gregarious nature. This was not merely a matter of Hunt’s nervous disposition, however, but of pressing physical circumstances which he needed to forget in order to survive as a writer. Coleridge would not have played with the idea of a lime-tree bower as a prison if he had ever done time in a real one.15 Even in ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge’s imagination defamiliarises the hearth so that it echoes his own alienation, recreating a childhood incarceration which can then be imaginatively overcome. Hunt, by contrast, sees the fireside as a social space which might feed the poet’s dreams, but which is always ready to be stirred into a cheerful blaze with the happy arrival of a visitor. His three essays on the pleasures of the fireside for The Round Table epitomise this attitude; so, too, does his invitation to the reader in The Indicator: ‘Now let us put our knees a little nearer the fire’.16 For all their innovations in mood and metre, Coleridge’s conversation poems are—like his conversations—lyrical monologues. Hunt, however, had endured the experience of being actually imprisoned, both when his father was gaoled for debt (one of his earliest memories) and in 1813–15. In later work Hunt referred cheerfully to the experience of being ‘caged’, and suggested that he was helped through the ordeal by his visits by his friends like Byron and Moore. And when Byron became an outcast from Regency society, Hunt wrote a warm, uplifting poem remembering his kindness:

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when Moore and you Came to my cage, like warblers kind and true, And told me, with your arts of cordial lying, How well I looked, when you both thought me dying. (‘To Lord Byron’, ll. 100–3) Indeed, Hunt probably was near death at some points (for the unhealthy actuality of his prison environment, see Cyrus Redding’s memory on p. 226). Thereafter, the importance of social visiting was carried into his relationship with readers, who are often addressed as welcome visitors rather than a privileged audience. Coleridge pities, but remains distant from the ‘poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd’ but, like Robert Browning, Hunt writes from the thick of it, and throughout his career keeps the theatre critic’s awareness of the rest of the audience. His so-called ‘vulgarity’ is literally of the vulgus, the common people. The Augustan Review noticed this propensity in its commentary on the first canto of The Story of Rimini: An ordinary poet, if urged to attempt the portraiture of a crowded and happy scene, might deploringly observe, that ‘every thing has been said, there can be no interest, no novelty, no singleness of effect in such a multitudinous picture’. Poets, like lovers, are indeed always impatient to get out of the throng into recesses, where individual feeling may expatiate; but Mr. Hunt has imparted to his moving multitude a reality and truth of colouring, which bring the whole scene before our eyes.17 When reading Hunt’s prose and poetry, we are invited to enlarge the circle of family and friends which (as Jeffrey Cox has demonstrated) made up the Cockney School. We form a group slightly larger than a coterie, and the apostrophes and interjections in Hunt’s verse—‘Hallo!’—are ways of attracting and holding attention, to form a community.18 This genial familiarity is assisted by Hunt’s careful preparation of the reader in prefaces to his journalism and poetry. For Carl Woodring ‘Hunt’s “we” is neither royal nor editorial; its force is rather that of an invitation: the reader may feel a sufficient kinship to merge in confession’.19 Hunt’s political editorials flowed like conversation, his letters like gossipy editorials; his letter to Byron from Casa Negroto, October 1822, gives us an impression of the mixture of politics and literature which made up their conversation: I thought to talk with you of ‘Liberals’, & illiberals, of copy, & subjects, & absolute Johns, and Boswells & Spencer, and all sorts of possible chattabilities. ‘Sir’, as Johnson would say, (or Scrope would say before he became a fallen arch-Davies) the world has few things better than

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literary inter-chattation but Byron, Sir, is milky,—Sir, he is lacteolous, and has gone off to a young lady…I am translating a trampling satire of Alfieri’s upon trade and money getting.20 Hunt makes this conversational dexterity the subject of one of his WishingCap essays, cajoling his readers into appreciation of his rapid flitting from subject to subject. The god Mercury, invoked as his model at this point, is an appropriate one—because of his swiftness of flight, and his sociability: We make no apology to the reader for indulging in digression. One’s style is modified by one’s habits, and we are so accustomed to whisk hither and thither by means of our Wishing-cap, that we shall not undertake to stick to any one subject together for a couple of paragraphs…. How can consistency or stationariness (we want a word to express exactly what we mean) be expected of one, who, in as many seconds, can be in as many parts of the world, and of time? who, as fast as he enumerates the instances, can be… —and here follows a two-column catalogue of some 94 flamboyantly diverse activities (see Figure 5), followed by Hunt’s observation: ‘You might as well attempt to make Mercury a clerk to a law-stationer’.21 Whereas Byron’s digressions test his relationship with the reader, and often serve to emphasise the poet’s distance, Hunt’s disarm, cajole and draw the reader into sympathy. ‘Dear Mercury’ was the idol of a journalist who specialised in shuttling between different groups of people and disseminating news and scandal in a cosily intimate way. The mobility of identity indicated in Hunt’s list of occupations (‘Monopolizing with the Tories, Compromising with the Whigs, Reforming with the Radicals’), plays with political difference while preserving the pleasure of variation which he also identified in metre. As David Perkins points out, Hunt anticipated the Symbolist poets of the later nineteenth century in his advocacy of an expressive theory of metre and a belief that verse works by continually surprising the reader.22 Surprise is of key importance at the levels of sense and sound in Hunt’s poetry, and his poems are most effective when intimacy is momentarily forgotten so that it can be re-introduced in a way that startles the reader. In arguing this I am aware that I rely on a Wordsworthian-Coleridgean criterion of aesthetic value which requires that we overcome the ‘film of familiarity’, but, as Perkins demonstrates, Hunt shared Wordsworth’s assumptions about the necessity of surprise in verse. An element of unexpectedness is vital for the aesthetic success of Hunt’s work, because he placed such ethical importance on the value of sociality; the poems in which this quality is realised most forcefully are those in which Hunt allows us to rediscover the unfamiliar or unsettling potential of intimacy.

Figure

5 Leigh Hunt’s ‘Wishing-cap persona’. From Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, X ( January 1833), p. 437. By courtesy of St Andrews University Library.

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Hunt achieves sudden revelations of intimacy in two poems well known for different reasons. His lyric ‘Rondeau’ (better known now as ‘Jenny Kissed Me’) dates from 1838; often anthologised, it has retained its charm to the present. The sonnet ‘It lies before me there’ was notable as one of the companion pieces to John Keats’s ‘On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair’. Both of Hunt’s poems reveal his ability to surprise his reader with a pleasurable moment of almost palpable human contact. In ‘Jenny Kissed Me’ the rondeau’s refrain allows readers to re-encounter Jenny’s action in the light of the poet’s humorous acceptance of increasing age, and accumulating failure: Jenny kissed me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in; Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in: Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, Say that health and wealth have missed me, Say I’m growing old, but add, Jenny kissed me. Jenny’s spontaneous affection seizes the poem, firing an energetic trochaic metre and charging the poet’s defiant address to Time: ‘put that in’ swings the balance of loss and failure momentarily in his favour. The poem weighs decrepitude against an instant of social encounter (she jumps up from a chair, presumably in some parlour), and demonstrates the power of intimacy in action: the lugubrious long vowel sounds of ‘weary’, ‘sad’ and ‘growing old’ are brisked aside by the delightful rattle of consonants in ‘Jenny kissed me’, while the infectiousness of the refrain and the enduring popularity of the poem as a whole (vastly improved by the substitution of Jenny’ for the original ‘Nelly’), prove Hunt’s point about the efficacy of animal spirits. In his sonnet on Milton’s hair, Hunt focuses on the sensation of a strangely cherished connection with another person: It lies before me there, and my own breath Stirs its thin outer threads, as though beside The living head I stood in honoured pride, Talking of lovely things that conquer death. Perhaps he pressed it once, or underneath Ran his fine fingers, when he leant, blank-eyed, And saw, in fancy, Adam and his bride With their heaped locks, or his own Delphic wreath. There seems a love in hair, though it be dead. It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread Of our frail plant,—a blossom from the tree

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Surviving the proud trunk; as if it said, Patience and Gentleness is Power. In me Behold affectionate eternity. Hunt’s presentation of Milton as a partaker in his conversation, ‘talking of lovely things that conquer death’, differs from the Romantic apprehension of the bard as an isolated, prophetic figure. Hunt keeps in play a sense of relationship with the adverbs ‘before’, ‘besides’ and ‘underneath’, and the lock of hair becomes the focus of intimacy: the poet’s ‘breath/ Stirs’ it, leading to the speculation, ‘Perhaps he pressed it once’. The verb ‘press’ is often used by Hunt to convey a mingled sensation of poignancy and tenderness: in ‘To T.L.H. Six years old, during a sickness’, for example, the verb is used in a moment of heartfelt paternal intimacy: ‘But when thy fingers press/And pat my stooping head,/I cannot bear the gentleness,—/ The tears are in their bed’ (ll. 21–4). In the sonnet to Milton, the lock of hair brings a thought of comparably tender contact: ‘Perhaps he pressed it once, or underneath/Ran his fine fingers’. Hunt’s poem goes on to suggest that, more than the ‘Delphic wreath’ of reputation, it is the human gesture that will survive, rather as Philip Larkin registers ‘with a sharp tender shock,/His hand withdrawn, holding her hand’ amongst the details of ‘An Arundel Tomb’.23 The sestet veers between the awkward—‘There seems a love in hair’—and the moving, helped by the hesitations of ‘though’ and ‘yet’. The image of hair as a blossom ‘Surviving the proud trunk’ is less than successful, however, because the pun on trunk is too heavy: we become uncomfortably aware of the bulk of a body, just when we should be thinking of something paradoxically frail but strong. The closing ‘utterance’ is nevertheless oddly moving, and holds within it the close of Keats’s more famous ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. The parallel affirmations, ‘Gentleness is Power’, ‘Beauty is Truth’, ask readers to reapproach what is known in a new light, a sense of possible revelation picked up in Hunt’s ‘behold’, although the line In me/Behold affectionate eternity’ yields a qualification of the sublime that is distinctively Hunt’s. The reverence for a relic of human genius is softened by the word ‘affectionate’, which conditioned Hunt’s most important friendships: ‘You make me affectionate when you call me Leigh’, he wrote to Byron in 1822, in the difficult aftermath of Shelley’s death.24 Human contact and human attachment in the Milton sonnet are underlined by the repeated image of the ‘thread’, which suggests the interweaving of past and present. Hunt expanded on the significance of hair in his essay ‘On Death and Burial’ in The Round Table: It is the part of us that preserves vitality longest; it is a clean and elegant substance: and it is especially connected with ideas of tenderness, in the cheek or the eyes about which it may have strayed, and the handling we may have given it on the living head.25

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He returned to the lock of hair in his first Wishing-Cap essay, in which he set out to tantalise readers with the same paradoxical intimacy: ‘We have had’, he teased, ‘personal acquaintance with people who lived a hundred, nay, ten hundred years ago […] We have touched the persons we allude to’. The tone here is not identical with that of the sonnet, but at heart the writer is fascinated by the same thing. The Wishing-Cap essay discloses details of Hunt’s collection of the hair of famous persons. What captivates him is the allure of intimate contact: Envy us, then, reader, that we have touched the hair of the divine Lucretia; the very same, perhaps, that caught the sunshine on her head when Ariosto was talking to her. (p. 439) This represents aesthetic rather than erotic desire: as with Milton’s hair, Hunt wants to be a party to conversation, or, more exactly, the moment of conversation including its sunny Italian surroundings. His reverie over Lucretia Borgia is also significant for its wholly unconventional view of her moral character.26 His description of Swift’s lock of hair reveals a more pained intimacy: ‘From the thought of the white lock, we turn in pity and grief, knowing what Swift must have undergone while it was on his head’ (p. 440). In this case, Hunt discovers imaginative sympathy with a fellow sufferer; with Napoleon, he returns to the role of the trusted insider: Bonaparte has left behind ‘nothing more than such a shred or two as the valet might have hastily picked up with his fingers’ (p. 441). This is the same writer who, by his own admission, spent time trying on the hats of his male friends Byron and Shelley. 27 When it comes to the hair of Shelley, Hunt details ‘the tenderness caused in our minds by looking at it’ (p. 441). The ‘tenderness caused by looking’ is, I think, how Hunt creates his own ‘sharp, tender shock’ of intimacy in his best poems. It is exemplified in The Story of Rimini. For Blackwood’s, Rimini defined the ‘obscene’ characteristics of the Cockney School, and Z’s attacks have received much attention for what they reveal of the politics of style and constructions of gender in the Romantic period. It is worth noting, however, that more liberal critics applauded Hunt’s ‘continuous description, intermingled with incidental strokes of passion and tenderness’.28 The vociferous hostility of Blackwood’s and the Quarterly has, perhaps, distracted us from the unqualified admiration The Story of Rimini received from the Augustan Review, the British Lady’s Magazine, the Dublin Examiner, the Eclectic and the more selective praise of the Edinburgh Review, the Literary Panorama and the Monthly Review. A brief glance at the terms of their approval shows that Hunt was far from receiving the universal opprobrium willed by Blackwood’s. The Augustan Review extracted a firm moral purpose from the poem: ‘we must pity while we blame her indulgence of a passion long combated and

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long resisted […] The conflicting feelings which agitate the partner of her tenderness, her guilt, and her remorse, are finely drawn’.29 While expressing reservations, the British Lady’s Magazine nevertheless applauded Hunt’s picture of ‘guilty tenderness and penitential woe’, finding his treatment ‘original and correct’.30 The Monthly Review weighed up the poem’s handling of ‘undue intimacy’ and moral reflection and, after some hesitation, found in Hunt’s favour: Though the scene, in which this unhallowed intimacy is related, is as delicately touched as such subjects are capable of being touched, yet enough occurs to alarm the vigilant and perhaps fastidious supervisors of female reading in the present nice era. It is but for a moment, however, that the crime is before the reader; while the shocking consequences are detailed with unaffected moral feeling, and strong power of pathetic composition.31 While some reviewers avoided direct quotation from the scene in canto III where Paulo and Francesca kiss and ‘read no more’, both the Edinburgh Review and the Literary Panorama had no scruples about reproducing it in full. Most reviewers admitted that the fourth canto presented exquisite portraits of guilt and remorse, but the Eclectic was irritated by the closing lines which, to the reviewer, suggested that Hunt had neglected the doctrine of atonement. These responses to the morality of The Story of Rimini might lead us to question confident assertions about the poem’s ‘forwarding various critiques of aristocratic hierarchy and established moral propriety’.32 Like the poem’s morality, its style provoked a wide range of responses. The Eclectic welcomed Hunt’s ‘easy, graceful style of familiar narrative’; the Dublin Examiner praised his poetic language as ‘perfectly true to nature’; the Monthly Review defended his ‘facility’, even when it appeared to run into ‘the very familiarity of conversation’. 33 Meanwhile, the Edinburgh Review identified ‘genuine poetry’ and ‘lively pictures of external objects’, although Hunt’s ‘familiarity and homeliness of diction’ were censured for ‘vulgarity’.34 Similarly mixed responses to the diction and versification were mentioned by the Literary Panorama, which found the co-existence of ‘lively, graceful’ versification and ‘a slovenly affectation of ease’.35 If we take the more moderate critical views of The Story of Rimini as a guide to the effect of the poem at the level of reading experience, we can see that the poem successfully blends an intimate subject with intimacy of address. The climax of the poem at the end of canto III is a scene of shared reading, charged with the illicit passion of Paulo and Francesca and with Hunt’s desire for intimacy with his readers. The greater part of The Story of Rimini was composed while Hunt was in the Surrey Gaol. The poem carries, I suggest, that peculiar gratitude to the reader as prison visitor which makes the poet unwilling to risk the

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challenges thrown to the public by Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads or by Percy Shelley in The Revolt of Islam. Hunt’s dedication to Lord Byron is a public expression of gratitude, for which he was condemned, and the Preface reveals that he also wishes to win the favour of a wider audience as well. To explain his decision not to append notes to the poem, Hunt wrote: if the reader understands me as he goes, and feels touched where I am most ambitious he should be, I can be content that he shall miss an occasional nicety or so in other matters, and not be quite sensible of the mighty extent of my information. (p. xii) As well as releasing the reader from the burden of notes, this also emphasises the desired companionship of the reading process. The idea of the reader understanding ‘as he goes’ contains the hint of a shared walk, an image elaborated at the end of the Preface: let me take them with me a while, whether in doors or out of doors, whether in the room or the green fields,—let my verses, in short, come under the perusal of ingenuous eyes, and be felt a little by the hearts that look out of them, and I am satisfied. (p. xix) Many readers met him on his own terms, and the Eclectic acknowledged that ‘we wish indeed that the story had moved on a little more rapidly; but we are not unwilling to loiter among the beautiful descriptions, and enjoy the fresh diction of Mr. Hunt’.36 ‘The tale I tell is of the human heart’, Hunt reminds his readers; whereas Keats praised Wordsworth’s ability to ‘think into the human heart’, Hunt had a more palpable design on his audience, continually reminding his readers of the physical vulnerability they shared.37 The lengthy descriptions in Rimini are a way of prolonging the reader’s visit and, likewise, moments that come close to the rhythms of Browning’s dramatic monologues, such as ‘He with the pheasant’s plume—there— bending now’ (I: 99), or ‘Ah—yes—no—’tis not he—’ (I: 245), help align the reader with Hunt’s perspective. John O.Hayden’s suggestion that the cinematic terms ‘pan’ and ‘zoom’ are appropriate to Hunt’s technique puts in contemporary form the Augustan Reviews enjoyment of Hunt’s ‘aerial perspective’.38 Hunt’s dextrous manipulation of the reader’s visual point of view achieves a ‘tolerant and reconciling’ perspective on life, as much as his more iconoclastic polemic.39 In canto I, for example, after the noise and colour of the crowd and the procession, Hunt presents the princess:

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The princess, from a distance, scarcely knows Which way to look; her colour comes and goes; And with an impulse and affection free She lays her hand upon her father’s knee, Who looks upon her with a laboured smile, Gathering it up into his own the while. (I: 252–8) It is a tiny detail of observation—the ‘human touch’ beloved by populist journalism—but it incorporates the thoughtless, then awkward intimacy between father and daughter in the brief hiatus before the wedding ceremony. In this way, Hunt’s spots of time are always moments of social revelation; they focus on the way humans behave to each other, as Wordsworth’s private epiphanies certainly do not. Hunt’s attention to details of social behaviour invariably involves the readership. The community of poet and readers holds a reservoir of affection against which to measure the coldness of the world. In The Story of Rimini, we are invited to dwell on the things in Francesca’s room because they are an expression of her father’s love for her (he has arranged for her belongings to be sent so that her old room can be recreated): The very books and all transported there, The leafy tapestry, and the crimson chair, The lute, the glass that told the shedding hours, The little urn of silver for the flowers, The frame for broidering, with a piece half done, And the white falcon, basking in the sun, Who, when he saw her, sidled on his stand, And twined his neck against her trembling hand. (III: 153–60) In this scene we join with Francesca’s tearful apprehension of the distance between her childhood and her marital home. Compare the similarly revealing domestic scene in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Home is so Sad’: A joyous shot at how things ought to be, Long fallen wide. You see how it was: Look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase. (ll. 7–10)40 Hunt, of course, does not share Larkin’s wry sense of the inevitability of disappointment, and the contents of Francesca’s chamber are suspiciously reminiscent of the furnishing of his cell in the Surrey Gaol. The poem

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touches on the homely details (as Francesca’s ‘trembling hand’ touches them) so that we can feel her husband’s lack of intimacy: He entered not, in turn, in her delights, Her books, her flowers, her taste for rural sights; Nay, scarcely her sweet singing minded he, Unless his pride was roused by company, (II: 184–7) Giovanni stands for everything alien to the community between Hunt and his readers; whereas we have walked round Francesca’s room, sharing her delight in each familiar object, Giovanni discounts each of her pleasures ‘in turn’. Throughout canto III, Hunt draws his reader into the shared taste which unites Paulo and Francesca. Their physical attraction grows from mental and emotional sympathy, and Hunt deliberately allows his readers to see things from Paulo and Francesca’s point of view. Leading up to the scene of reading, Hunt describes the walk which leads to Francesca’s pavilion: So now you walked beside an odorous bed Of gorgeous hues, white, azure, golden, red; And now turned off into a leafy walk, Close and continuous, fit for lovers’ talk; And now pursued the stream, and as you trod Onward and onward o’er the velvet sod, Felt on your face an air, watery and sweet, And a new sense in your soft-lightning feet; And then perhaps you entered upon shades, Pillowed with dells and uplands ‘twixt the glades. (III: 404–13) Hunt encourages his reader to supply a fantasy to complement the poem’s. The involvement of the reader is emphasised by all the second person pronouns; equally striking is the use of ‘perhaps’, which shows the openness of the Huntian dream. Often identified as ‘escapist’ The Story of Rimini is not a private, involuted, or narcissistic romance, but one in which readers are encouraged to take the lead. The intimacy of reading is suggested by the care Hunt lavishes on Francesca’s reading posture: Ready she sat with one hand to turn o’er The leaf, to which her thoughts ran on before, The other propping her white brow, and throwing Its ringlets out, under the skylight glowing.

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So sat she fixed; and so observed was she Of one, who at the door stood tenderly. (III: 571–6) Francesca is ‘ready’ in a sense which punningly encompasses her receptivity to reading. She is ‘doubly fixed’ (l. 570), amid many other ‘doubles’ in the poem, because she also embodies the sensitivity of Hunt’s readers. The detail of one hand pushing back her hair as the other holds the corner of the page invites readers to dispose their limbs in the same way. The ‘lingering page’ to which Paulo and Francesca thrill describes exactly the style of Hunt’s narration and his desire to prolong the moment of readerly encounter. When it finally occurs, the kiss between Paulo and Francesca is at once the consummation and cessation of their reading. With its curious mixture of fidelity and infidelity, freedom and enslavement, the end of canto III achieves the troubling intimacy which characterises Hunt’s best poetry. Hunt’s restraint at this moment in Rimini is thrown into relief by more explicit passages in his other poems and in his letters. Hunt’s letters in particular help to clarify his peculiarly ‘free’ relationship with the reading public. On a private level, his behaviour towards his sister-in-law (the botanist and author Elizabeth Kent) bothered friends who felt that Hunt’s familiarity and flirtatiousness bordered on the improper. Spontaneous physical contact seems to have typified his manner, so much so that Benjamin Haydon fulminated against Hunt’s ‘smuggering fondness’ for Kent, outraged at the way he would ‘dawdle over her bosom, to inhale her breath, to lean against her thigh & play with her petticoats’.41 When apart, their intimacy continued in letters, revealing similarities between his modes of address to her and to his readers. We have seen how the image of writer and reader walking together was of Hunt’s, and this readerly bond was also well established in his correspondence with Kent. Having asked her to send some pressed leaves from her garden in the next consignment of books to Italy, Hunt added: But do not do this, if it make you think too tenderly of our old walks. I have avoided country walks, since I found you were not to come out last year. I always go direct to town. I have no companion for my green lanes, & desire none, since I can have neither your sister or yourself.42 A little later he asks her to ‘Make haste, for heaven’s sake, with the box & the Sylvan Sketches, in which I mean to be in the middle of the woods with you, as I am already I know not how often’.43 As well as imaginary shared walks, Hunt signalled imaginary physical contact in his letters. Writing from Florence in April 1825, he mingled literary criticism and gossip with textual flirtation: ‘Here is a kiss for you, as long as I can make it. Does it do you good, or harm? Tell me truly’, and in his next letter: ‘it would very much inconvenience me not to give you a kiss for your kindness; so here is

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a long one_________________’.44 In the first letter, Hunt pens a long oval shape to convey the kiss (see Figure 6); in the second he draws a long line.45 If there was anything of illicit sexual attraction in the relationship between Hunt and Kent, it is interesting that Hunt reserved some of the same terms of endearment for his reading public. Although Hunt does not (as far as I know) offer kisses to his readers, his concern to bring their knees close to the fire and his desire to clasp hands created an unprecedented level of textual physical intimacy, an erotics of reading in which the idea of the ‘affectionate friend’ almost dissolves gender categories altogether: ‘we wish there were no such distinction in our language between a friend and a mistress’, he wrote as an aside in part IV of ‘Specimens of a Dictionary of Love and Beauty’.46 Hunt’s mode of address to the reader risks vulgarity and impropriety. His most outrageous ogling of female beauty, however, coexists with a more enlightened attitude as he strives for a form of intimacy to which men and women are equally responsive. Greg Kucich has suggested that Hunt’s circle established ‘an important model of progressive gender relations’, and it is important to see that this ‘progressiveness’ flickered in and out of his poetry too.47 One of the most interesting aesthetic legacies of the Cockney School is the way its treatment of female beauty contributed to the development of the Pre-Raphaelite School and the cult of the ‘stunner’. To conclude this chapter I shall examine one point at which his work intersects with mid-Victorian aesthetics. Hunt’s late poem ‘Godiva’ is rarely discussed, but it shows how a poetics of intimacy continued throughout his career. Despite an early Cockney indulgence in nympholepsy, his more mature work rejects the perspective of the artful voyeur and encounters more challenging questions of where and how to look. In The Indicator (27 October 1819), Hunt celebrated the legendary Lady Godiva as ‘a real noble-hearted woman of flesh and blood’ (p. 17). He defended the truth of the story on the grounds of ‘innate evidence […] Imagination can invent a good deal; affection more: but affection can sometimes do things, such as the tenderest imagination is at least not in the habit of inventing; and this piece of noble-heartedness we believe to have been one of them’ (p. 18). At this point, Hunt suggests a correspondence between Godiva’s act of charity and his own act of affectionate belief, a doubling which is emphasised by the similarity between Godiva’s feudal and oppressive husband, Leofric, and the philosopher Hume who omitted the story from his history: A certain coldness of temperament, not unmixed with aristocratical pride, or at least with a great aversion from every thing like vulgar credulity, rendered his scepticism so extreme, that it became in spite of itself a sort of superstition in turn, and blinded him to the claims of every species of enthusiasm, civil as well as religious. (p. 17)

Figure 6

An oval kiss, in the letter from Leigh Hunt to Elizabeth Kent, 2 April 1825 (see top left of illustration). The Carl H.Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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Leofric’s aristocratic hard-heartedness towards the people of Coventry is duplicated in the disdain of the sceptical philosopher and contrasted with the warmth of Godiva’s spirit and that of Hunt and his receptive audience. Hunt’s 1819 telling of the story emphasised the idea of a mind […] capable of piercing through the clouds of custom, of ignorance, and even of self-interest […] This mind was Godiva’s. The other sex, always more slow to admit reason through the medium of feeling, were then occupied to the full in their warlike habit. It was reserved for a woman to anticipate whole ages of liberal opinion, and to surpass them in the daring virtue of setting a principle above a custom. (p.18) Often accused of being ‘excessive’ himself, Hunt projects himself into Godiva’s act of ‘principled excess’ (p. 18): What scene can be more touching to the imagination,—beauty, modesty, feminine softness, a daring sympathy; an extravagance, producing by the nobleness of it’s object and the strange gentleness of it’s means, the grave and profound effect of the most reverend custom. We may suppose the scene taking place in the warm noon; the doors all shut, the windows closed; the earl and his court serious and wondering; the other inhabitants, many of them gushing with grateful tears, and all reverently listening to hear the footsteps of the horse. (p. 19) Hunt has in mind the opening pageant of The Story of Rimini although now the crowd has its eyes averted, making the public street into a place of domestic security and affection. Godiva’s mixture of ‘feminine softness’ and ‘daring sympathy’ is, I would suggest, an image for Hunt’s ideal of his own literary persona, extravagantly and yet gently set against cold custom. ‘Sympathy’, he reminded his readers in a later Indicator essay, ‘is our first duty’. 48 Hunt domesticates her nakedness by suggesting that she was ‘divested of her wrapping garment, as if she had been going into a bath’, and he imagines her hair as a veil which left ‘only her white legs remaining conspicuous’ (pp. 18–19). This physical detail teeters on the brink of sexual leering although Hunt has a safeguard against voyeurism in his poem, in the shape of the male inhabitant of Coventry who did look at Godiva and was struck blind. And Hunt acknowledges the temptation she presents: ‘We wonder that none of our painters have yet drawn us Godiva upon her horse. They can hardly have met with the subject, or surely they would have fallen in love with it’ (p. 19). By the mid-nineteenth century, however, despite moralistic objections to the ‘singularity and barbarousness’ of the theme, the subject had occurred to

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other artists.49 W.C.Marshall’s statue of Godiva was completed in 1854 and John Collier’s 1898 painting suggests that the artist had indeed fallen in love with his subject. On the literary front, Hunt reviewed Tennyson’s Poems (1842) for the Church of England Quarterly Review, and identified the ‘peculiar exoterical delicacy’ of the position of Lady Godiva. But he criticised Tennyson for the ‘nonchalance’ of his approach to the subject in the poem’s epigraph: I waited for the train at Coventry; I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge, To watch the three tall spires; and there I shaped The city’s ancient legend into this:— ‘There is’, Hunt found (with more than a trace of Blackwood s sensitivity to class), ‘a drawl of Bond-street in it’: the true spirit of the master, we conceive, is not hit in this treatment of the subject. The feelings of the heroine’s heart ought to have been more spoken of, and those of the good people inside the houses, who did not think of ‘peeping’.50 In a letter to his friend John Hunter, Hunt gave further details of his objections to Tennyson’s handling of the Godiva story: with wonderful error for so true a poet, he mistook the spirit of [the subject], substituting, indeed, the gross letter instead, and parading the naked body. And as one mistake brings another, he violated even the most obvious probability and matter-of-fact, making poor Godiva absolutely come naked down the stairs of her own house, and sneak without any necessity from pillar to post in consequence; when it is clear that she would have done as any lady would do in like circumstances, or as she does when she goes to bathe—keep herself wrapped in something till the last moment. Pardon this most involuntary difference with a fine writer, and accept my little inscription.51 The little inscription beginning Hunt’s ‘Godiva’ was to ‘John Hunter, friend of Leigh Hunt’s verse, and lover of all duty,/Hear how the boldest naked deed was clothed in saintliest beauty’ (ll. 1–2). Correcting Tennyson’s emphasis on Godiva’s fear of the ‘cunning eyes’ of the gothic architecture and the ‘gables crowding’, Hunt focuses on the sympathetic communal response to Godiva’s sacrifice: ‘She said—the people will be kind; they love a gentle deed;/They piously will turn from me, nor shame a friend in need’ (ll. 7–8). Tennyson, on the other hand, had adapted Keats’s view of Madeline in The Eve of St Agnes, and followed Godiva’s undressing stage by stage:

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Then fled she to her inmost bower, and there Unclasp’d the wedded eagles of her belt, The grim Earl’s gift; but ever at a breath She linger’d, looking like a summer moon Half-dipt in cloud: anon she shook her head, And shower’d the rippled ringlets to her knee; Unclad herself in haste; adown the stair Stole on; and, like a creeping sunbeam, slid From pillar unto pillar, until she reach’d The gateway. (ll. 42–51)52 I think we are inclined to agree with Hunt’s criticisms of Tennyson’s handling here. Instead of ‘parading the naked body’, Hunt enters into Godiva’s feelings: The door is passed; the saddle pressed; her body feels the air;/Then down they let, from out its net, her locks of piteous hair’ (ll. 19– 20). The hair is ‘piteous’ because it takes pity on her nakedness and because it inspires tenderness in the watching poet and ladies. She is ‘transparently veiled’, her hair becomes a gentle covering thrown round her by kindly non-viewers. Everything we know of Hunt’s attraction to locks of hair tells us that Godiva’s tresses enable him to sympathise with her exposed condition. Her nakedness is successfully realised as a restoration of human innocence, skilfully wrought through repeated ‘un-’ prefixes: In fancy still she holds her way, forever pacing on,/The sight unseen, the guiltless Eve, the shame unbreathed upon’ (ll. 41–2). If we remember the reviewer of Hunt who found that ‘never did writer lay himself…more nakedly open’, we can appreciate the Huntian spirit of self-revelation in ‘Godiva’. It entails both the generous exposure of self, coupled with a pressing obligation on the reader to be kind: Sweet saint! No shameless brow was hers, who could not bear to see, For thinking of her happier lot, the pine of poverty:53 No unaccustomed deed she did, in scorn of custom’s self, She that but wished the daily bread upon the poor man’s shelf. Naked she went, to clothe the naked. New she was, and bold, Only because she held the laws which Mercy preached of old. They say she blushed to be beheld, e’en of her ladies’ eyes; Then took her way with downward look, and brief, bewildered sighs. A downward look; a beating heart; a sense of the new, vast, Wide, open, naked world, and yet of every door she passed; A prayer, a tear, a constant mind, a listening ear that glowed, These we may dare to fancy there, on that religious road. (ll. 27–38)

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Hunt’s couplets may have a conventional moralistic chime to them, but there are surprises. The adjective ‘new’ startles us with its proximity to ‘nude’, encapsulating her (Huntian) break with tradition which at the same time hearkens back to an older ‘law’. More unsettling is the list of five stark adjectives to summarise Godiva’s apprehension of her surroundings: ‘a sense of the new, vast,/Wide, open, naked world’. The word ‘new’ is repeated here with a different meaning, one which ushers in the cold emptiness of modernity. We hear the same ‘vast edges drear/And naked shingles of the world’ in Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, composed a year after ‘Godiva’ appeared in the New Monthly Magazine. For Arnold and Hunt intimacy forms a shelter from the unkindness and alienation of contemporary life. In cherishing ‘little cheerful words’, like Godiva’s before her ordeal, and in drawing attention to the ‘glowing ear’ of the crowd, Hunt breaks away from the myth of isolated Romantic genius. In so doing he risks over-familiarity and vulgarity, although it was this faith in human society which ensured the survival of his work from the Romantic period to our own, enabling Hunt, like Godiva, to ‘pass by many a scorner’s door’.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

1815 edition, from PWLH. BLJ, IV: p. 320. RR, C, I: p. 205. See JKCD; Cox; Kucich; Elizabeth Jones, review of Cox in Romanticism, VI, 2 (2000), pp. 262–4. These critics followed the investigations in Cockney style by John Bayley and Christopher Ricks. John Bayley has recently updated his reading of Keats’s Huntian ‘vulgarity’; see London Review of Books (10 June 1999). PWLH, p. xvii. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, XI (February 1833), pp. 630–6, at p. 631. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R.L.Brett and A.R.Jones (2nd edn., London: Methuen, 1963; reprinted 1991), p. 7 (my italics). BPW, IV: p. 305. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, XI, p. 630. Edinburgh Review, XXX (1818), pp. 87–120; RR, B, II: pp. 895, 896. Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays; see Howe, IV: p. 214. Edinburgh Review, XXX (1818); RR, B, II: p. 895. Critical Review, V (1814); RR, C, I: p. 304. WPW, p. 269.1 am grateful to John Beer for drawing this poem to my attention. For the imaginative exploration of imprisonment in John Keats’s writing, see Nicola Trott, John Keats and the prison house of history’ in K&H, pp. 262–79. Indicator, p. 76. RR, C, I: p. 35. ‘On Hearing a Little Musical Box’, Foliage, p. lviii. Carl Woodring, ‘Leigh Hunt as Personal Essayist’, in The Life and Times of Leigh Hunt: Papers Delivered at a Symposium, ed. Robert A.McCown (Iowa City: Friends of the University of Iowa Libraries, 1985), pp. 61–72, at p. 69.

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20 MS letter 25 October 1822: location John Murray Archive, London. Quoted by kind permission of John Murray. 21 ‘The Wishing Cap’ No. 1, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, X ( January 1833), pp. 435– 42, at pp. 436–7; subsequent page references in the text. 22 For Hunt’s theory of poetic metre, see David Perkins, ‘Wordsworth, Hunt, and Romantic Understanding of Meter’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XCIII, 1 (1994), pp. 1–17. 23 Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber & Faber, 1964; reprinted 1987). 24 MS letter 29 October 1822: location John Murray Archive, London. 25 William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, The Round Table (1817; Woodstock Facsimile Series: Oxford and New York, 1991), p. 201. 26 Hunt’s imaginative sympathy with figures from the past was often charged with the spirit of investigative journalism, and his treatment of the Eloisa and Abelard story is an excellent example of a refusal to be sentimental. See Part II of ‘Specimens of a Dictionary of Love and Beauty’ in the New Monthly Magazine, XVII (1826), pp. 136–49. Hunt describes Eloisa as Abelard’s ‘victim’, describing him as a ‘selfish’ and ‘cold, querulous and withered’: ‘Eloisa writes like a man with a woman’s heart; Abelard like a crabbed schoolmaster’. See esp. pp. 148–9. 27 Autobiography, II: p. 213. 28 Review of PWLH (1832) in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, XI (February 1833), pp. 631–6, at p. 632. 29 RR, C, I: p. 37. 30 RR, C, I: p. 240. 31 RR, C, II: p. 697. 32 See, for example, Kucich. John O.Hayden draws attention to favourable reviews of the poem, and expressed surprise that Hunt could be accused of telling ‘a morally loose tale’. See John O.Hayden, ‘Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini: Reloading the Romantic Canon’, Durham University Journal, LXXIX (1987), pp. 279–87, at p. 285; hereafter Hayden. 33 RR, C, I: pp. 324; 308; C, II: p. 697. 34 RR, C, I: pp. 377–85. 35 RR, C, II: p. 544. 36 RR, C, I: p. 324. 37 LJK, I: p. 282. 38 Hayden, p. 280. RR, C, I: p. 38. 39 Foliage, p. 17. 40 Quoted from Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (see note 23 above). 41 The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope (5 vols, 1960, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), II: p. 83. 42 Gates, p. 158. 43 Gates, pp. 162–3. 44 Gates, pp. 169, 172. 45 I am grateful to Stephen Wagner, Curator of the Pforzheimer Collection at New York Public Library, for permission to reproduce Hunt’s letter and his generous help in checking details of the manuscript. 46 New Monthly Magazine, XVII (May 1826), p. 425. But see Hunt’s resistance to the idea of a woman cross-dressing in his essay on ‘Mrs Jordan’. 47 See Kucich. 48 Indicator, p. 57. 49 Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D.Jump (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967; reprinted 1986), p. 120.

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50 Ibid., pp. 127; 133. 51 CLH, II: p. 232. 52 Alfred Tennyson, Poems of 1842, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: MacDonald and Evans, 1968; reprinted 1975). 53 The echoes of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ help to question the distant selfsufficiency of the Romantic lyricist.

7

Cockney chivalry Hunt, Keats and the aesthetics of excess Greg Kucich

To be perfectly honest, guv, a ‘true Cockney’ never would ’ave ’eard of chivalry. London Taxi Driver ( January, 2001)

‘Proves my point!’ I exclaimed as the taxi shot through Bloomsbury on the way from Victoria Station to my hotel. I had just arrived, glazed over from an overnight transatlantic flight, and found myself dropped into a fabulous research opportunity, seated there behind an expert authority on my topic, an East End driver, engaged in a time-honoured Cockney profession, who also boasted deep interest in the traditions of English poetry. His pronouncement came, after a ruminating moment at a red light, to my query about the apparent incompatibility of Leigh Hunt’s ‘Cockney’ mannerisms in a narrative poem adapted from Dante and saturated with medieval chivalry, The Story of Rimini (1816). ‘When he talks about chivalry’, Z railed in one of the first of many periodical attacks on the poem, ‘he is always thinking of himself [and] raves perpetually…as a Cheapside shop-keeper’.1 ‘Don’t you think it’s strange?’ I asked. ‘In fact’, I went on, roused from my jet lag and keen to learn more about the sounds of Hunt’s Cockney rhymes, ‘I wonder how a “true Cockney” would pronounce the word “chivalry”’? The definitive answer clarified that Cockneys don’t, and never did, belong anywhere near chivalric settings, and this was apparently part of the meaning, at least for his first readers, of some of Hunt’s poetic language. Proud of his own city origins and membership of the Cockney School of poetry, which he called ‘the most illustrious in England’,2 Hunt’s poetry was a kind of upstart, arriviste presence: he ‘frightened’ the booksellers and—on personal, stylistic, and political levels—upset established social and aesthetic hierarchies in Regency England. The formidable resources of Tory reviewers were mobilised: Hunt was ridiculed as that ‘wicked… King of the Cockneys’, and drew to him an eager protégé, born within the sound of Bow Bells: John Keats.3 Hunt’s Story of Rimini and other poems divided his contemporaries, and also comprise one of the most controversial features of current

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reassessments of his cultural significance, particularly in relation to Keats. Any new claim for the sophistication of Hunt’s political and poetic practices runs up against generations of disparagement, beginning with Z, focused on his apparent stylistic ineptitude, weakness of thought and ‘vulgarity’ of taste. All of these deficiencies were apparent in Hunt’s leadership of ‘the Cockney School of Politics, as well as the Cockney School of Poetry’.4 In commenting on Rimini in 1910, Barnette Miller laments that ‘a grave subject in the garb of everyday language is degraded into the incongruous and prosaic’.5 In 1957 Graham Hough sounds much like Z’s outrage at Hunt’s Cockney impertinence: ‘It is a handling of the Paolo and Francesca episode from Dante, debased to utter vulgarity by an affectation of colloquial ease and a sort of chatty pertness. He combines this with a cocky sniggering appreciation of female charms’.6 Walter Jackson Bate, duly noting Hunt was a literary and political figure of considerable stature, nevertheless winces at the ‘unpleasing mannerisms’ of his poetry and derides ‘the rapid slippershuffle of Hunt’s versification’.7 Even a more sympathetic critic like James Thompson labels The Story of Rimini ‘spasmodic’, and shakes his head at the ‘coquettish lapses…banal chatter…and glaring examples of stylistic inappropriateness’ caused by Hunt’s ‘notorious’ Cockney habits.8 Those same traits also prompt Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, one of the most careful and appreciative readers of Hunt’s poetry, to find in The Story of Rimini: ‘rampant descriptiveness’, ‘lack of self-control’, ‘loose and vague …syntax’, and ‘confusion’.9 Hunt’s influence on Keats provoked more severe critical charges. Z, of course, noticed Keats’s mimicry of Hunt from the outset, and directed one of his assaults in Blackwood’s at Hunt’s dangerous tendency to draw disciples like Keats. It is Keats’s enthusiasm for Hunt’s liberal politics, his use of ‘the spoken jargon of Cockneys’, and his cultivation of Hunt’s ‘loose, nerveless versification and Cockney rhymes’ that induce Z to regret the demise of ‘a boy of pretty abilities’. 10 That indictment has sent Keats scholars scrambling since the nineteenth century. The traditional response implicitly endorses Z’s pronouncement, playing down Keats’s political interests and dismissing most of his early poetry as stylistically weak thanks to his ‘prototype’ Hunt. It was an influence, so the argument goes, that Keats quickly and fortunately transcended on his way to the later works. To the great benefit of poetry, Bate summarises, Hunt ‘was a model who could in time be surpassed’.11 This view was countered by Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson, whose historicist readings of Keats emphasised a calculated aesthetic and political purpose, rather than incoherence, in the Cockney style Keats imbibed from Hunt.12 William Keach’s excellent essay on Keats’s Cockney couplets further illustrated the stylistic and intellectual complexity in Hunt’s run-on versification, demonstrating how ‘Hunt’s effort to reform the heroic couplet is an exact image of his reformist politics’.13 These studies provided a foundation for Jeffrey Cox’s and Nicholas Roe’s books on Cockney

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culture, which take the Cockney style of Hunt and early Keats seriously and argue for the persistence of such Cockney schooling throughout Keats’s literary career (see Cox; JKCD). Both accord close attention to Cockney characteristics of style, where luxurious excess, linguistic eccentricity and run-on couplets signal the overlap of Cockney poetics and politics. Instead of flinching at Z’s accusations, we can now make positive use of his invective inasmuch as it draws attention to aspects of Hunt’s and Keats’s Cockneyism that entail complicated poetic experiments and perform significant cultural work. This revaluation has not gone uncontested, however, and there is room for further investigation. Keach’s notion that the loosening of the Augustan couplet was a formal analogue to subversive politics makes good sense, but remains a somewhat generalised concept—as Keach acknowledges when noting the difficulty of verifying a political purpose in Keats’s early aesthetic choices.14 Similarly, while Roe and Cox draw parallels between Hunt’s reformist politics and Keats’s linguistic idiosyncracies, the precise political charge of phrases like ‘lawny slope’ and ‘swelling leanness’ is not always readily evident. Equally, we have yet to determine exactly what Z might have heard and found offensive in ‘Cockney rhymes’ and ‘the spoken jargon of Cockney’. Beyond recognising the audacity of some of Keats’s rhymes, such as the ‘turn/aubùrne’ rhyme in ‘I stood tip-toe’,15 it is not yet clear how such rhymes approximate to ‘the spoken jargon of Cockney’ (my emphasis). What was the precise nature of that ‘jargon’? Was it street slang? Accented pronunciation? Speech rhythms? Coded jokes? Turns of phrase? And why did such linguistic traits appear so threatening to Z? Turning these questions to a fresh reading of Cockney poetic style seems worthwhile, because on this aesthetic level more than a few critics remain unpersuaded by recent arguments for the value of Hunt’s style and the significance of Hunt’s (and Keats’s) Cockneyism. The historical emphasis in criticism of the Hunt group, for example in Keats and History, continues to provoke controversy.16 The volume of essays based on Harvard’s 1995 Bicentennial Keats Conference attends to Keats’s politics, yet the first part of its tide, The Persistence of Poetry, implies resistance to materialist encroachments. Indeed, the editors champion the traditional idea of Keats as a pure ‘poet’s poet’, characterising the Harvard conference as ‘a celebration of the art of poetry itself and honouring readers enthralled across the generations by ‘that primary precritical experience of Keats’.17 Hunt’s campaign against ‘flatter’d state’, which Keats supported, is marginal to this vision of ‘primary’ aesthetic achievement.18 So too is Keats’s admiration for Hunt’s poetry of ‘sociality’ in The Story of Rimini and the ‘anacreontic’ drinking songs emulated in ‘Give me women, wine and snuff.19 A large part of the difficulty in moving Hunt to the centre of Romantic studies stems from the need for more detailed theoretical and analytical models that may explain the stylistic incongruities and eccentricities associated with ‘Cockneyism’.

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In this chapter I suggest how Hunt’s political strategy depended on the construction, in his writing and day-to-day life, of the persona of an ‘insider’—one who infiltrates hyperbolic (‘Cockney’) mannerisms into élite cultural contexts in ways that compromise hierarchies of rank, power, and prestige. Secondly, I trace manifestations of this in poetic style, in The Story of Rimini and Keats’s adaptation of its poetic/political manoeuvres in two related poems of the same year, Specimen of an Induction to a Poem and Calidore: A Fragment. I do not seek to reclaim these poems as ‘great’ works in any conventional or canonical sense; rather, I wish to show how their aesthetic of excess was a poetic equivalent to Hunt’s political opposition. Hunt’s aesthetics and his oppositional stance as an editor are focused in Z’s caricature of a man ‘of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry, and politics’, extravagance being the measure of Hunt’s ambitions to cultural and public life.20 Understanding Hunt’s aesthetic strategies, and their relation to other forms of radical discourse, does away with the mistaken idea that he was a dubious influence and reveals how Keats’s later, better-known poems of 1818–19 incorporated Hunt’s voice. Hunt formed the persona of the ‘insolent insider’ while imprisoned at Horsemonger Lane Gaol (1813–15), where he invented a Cockneyfied aesthetic excess that mocks authority and blurs social and political hierarchies.21 From the 1808 launch of the Examiner onwards, a central aim of Hunt’s reformist politics had been to challenge exclusive distinctions of rank, party, privilege and power. Indeed, from early on, well before he started the Examiner, Hunt had inclined towards this kind of subversiveness by thinking of himself as a liminal character, a ‘creole’, as he put it, who moved across and between conventional social categories.22 Hunt’s ancestors came from ‘plebian’ and ‘aristocratic’ lines. His racial origins went back to Anglo-Saxon roots and combined Irish elements that seemed comparable in some ways, he claimed, to the lineage of ‘negro chief[s]’. His inherited temperament was ‘clerical’, given his father’s ecclesiastical profession, and also tempestuous in a way that reflected the family’s colonial sojourn under Caribbean skies.23 Social manifestations of these creolised instincts became apparent to Hunt at Christ’s Hospital, which impressed him for drawing pupils from all ‘variety of ranks’. In recalling the school’s inclusiveness, Hunt characterised Christ’s Hospital as ‘a medium between the patrician pretension of such schools as Eton and Westminster, and the plebeian submission of the charity schools’.24 The mobility inherent in Hunt’s family background and schooling came home to him in one of his deepest areas of delight, his love of reading, when he discovered Cooke’s cheap editions of the British poets. Designed to introduce readers of modest incomes to the British classics, Cooke’s editions opened a gateway to high culture for sixpence a number. They allowed Hunt to become a passionate consumer and self-appointed purveyor of culture, ‘doting’ upon the volumes, buying them ‘over and over again’, and distributing them to classmates like ‘buttered crumpets’.25 Here in the schoolboy is the germ of

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the ‘extravagant pretensions’ which for Z identified the ‘Professor’ of ‘THE COCKNEY SCHOOL’.26 Definitions of Cockney identity and speech have varied widely, the most persistent feature of the ‘true Cockney’ being claim to birth within the sound of Bow Bells.27 Recent studies of Cockney culture stress its protean vigour, distinguishing among various forms of Cockney experience associated with working-class life throughout London. Dialect linguists, for instance, track the subtle tonal differences among ‘genuine’, ‘light’, ‘deep’, ‘rough’, ‘vigorous’, ‘refined’ and ‘broad’ Cockney, variations depending on profession, income, social situation, cultural aspiration and location in London.28 Around Hunt’s time, the category was even more open-ended, as Gareth Stedman Jones explains, generally including any London townsperson ‘without landed connections’ or classical education, though often associated negatively with lower social orders and effeminate behaviour.29 Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) defines ‘Cockney’ generally as ‘A native of London’ but also conveys derogatory class and gender insinuations: ‘Any effeminate, ignorant, low, mean, despicable citizen’.30 John Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791) and the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) similarly define ‘Cockney’ as a citizen of London, and a ‘low’ or effeminate fellow. Samuel Pegge responds to Johnson’s derision by defending Cockney speech in his Anecdotes of the English Language (1814), arguing for the Saxon authenticity of the idiom of ‘the true Cockney’.31 Moreover, Walker notes that Cockney language seeps across social barriers as the accepted pronunciation of London dwellers, who are ‘upon the whole the best pronouncers of the English language’ because their speech is the most ‘generally received’.32 Thus, while the Cockney designation could be utilised by Z and others to enforce distinctions between ‘vulgar’ and ‘genteel’, as Jones argues,33 it could also represent a liminal space in which ‘Cockney jargon’—the ‘best pronunciation of English’—drew together all levels of London’s citizens. Which is not to say that they all got along: popular histories of Cockney culture abound with stories of costermongers abusing the wealthy in coded Cockney speech. Accounts of Cockney bravura typically feature vignettes like the following: ‘Hansom to the opera, sir?’ a cabman called to a lordly gentleman, who looked like a fare. ‘Hansom to the opera, sir?’ A sweep who happened to be passing, and professed to regard the enquiry as addressed to him, replied, ‘Vell, not to-night, my tulip. I ‘aint cleaned up yet. But’, he added, jerking his thumb towards the lordly gentleman, ‘’ere’s a cove as is!’34 That Cockney cheekiness of this sort dates back at least to the early nineteenth century may be traced in the ritual festivals of Cockney

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costermongers, presided over by Cockney Kings dressed ostentatiously in mock royal costumes—ancestors of the Cockney Kings and Pearlies who continue the practice today. In Hunt’s time the energetic and, at times, threatening aspect of Cockney cockiness helps explain the defensive vigour of Z’s responses: ‘audacious arrogance’, ‘shameless irreverence’, ‘vulgar insolence’, ‘pert loquaciousness’, ‘shocking levity’.35 In the early nineteenth century new controversies emerged over politicised distinctions between ‘vulgar’ and ‘polished’ speech, and in this linguistic sphere Cockney culture became most assertive. Modifying English pronunciations, especially through the interposition of vowel sounds, has been one of the chief historical characteristics of Cockney speech, reinforcing through accentual licence Cockney aptitudes for mobility and the blurring of difference.36 The aggressive potential of Cockney speech has been reinforced, moreover, by Cockney rhyming slang (still used today in phrases like ‘plates of meat’, reduced to ‘plates’, for ‘feet’), which has served at least since the early nineteenth century, according to Franklyn, as a verbal weapon to disarm socially superior auditors, to display ‘linguistic invincibility’ and boundless ‘self-esteem’.37 Historians of language have traced an even more overtly political form of Cockney linguistic mobility in later eighteenth-century debates about the social significance of common speech, debates which reached a peak of controversial intensity around the time Hunt began The Story of Rimini. Olivia Smith and John Barrell demonstrate, for instance, how theoretical disputes about ‘correct’ and ‘low’ speech in the later eighteenth century were implicated in class conflicts over aspirations of so-called ‘lower’ orders to gain increased political enfranchisement.38 Conservative attitudes, as might be expected, enforced strict demarcations between the common speech of lower social orders and the refined language of a classically educated élite, as can be seen, for example, in Bishop Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and James Harris’s Hermes (1751). This linguistic divide also posited the moral and intellectual superiority of the minority trained to speak refined (‘classical’) English, which then became the theoretical justification for restricting political participation and leadership to those who could speak ‘correctly’. Substantial counter-arguments for the flexibility of linguistic standards and the political rights of common speakers emerged in Joseph Priestley’s Rudiments of Grammar (1761), Thomas Spence’s new phonetic alphabet of vernacular speech, The Grand Repository of the English Language (1775) and Ronald Sharp’s preface to John Fell’s liberal Essay towards an English Grammar (1784) which links linguistic and political ‘liberty’. Such efforts to enfranchise vernacular speech became a staple of reformist politics, evident in the trials of Spence and William Hone, in John Home Tooke’s The Diversions of Purley (1798, 1805) and William Cobbett’s A Grammar of the English Language (1819). This radicalised linguistic theory informed the experiments in Lyrical Ballads, and produced what Smith calls an

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‘intellectual vernacular’ most evident in the prose style of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (1790), which insinuated common speech, and by extension common citizens, into public political life.39 These infiltrations of an ‘intellectual vernacular’ into public discourse offered theoretical and practical reinforcement for the linguistic and social mobility already associated with Cockney identity. This background may explain why Hunt invoked Wordsworth’s precedent, to the outrage of Tory reviewers, to justify his ‘freer style’ of versification and idiom in Rimini and Foliage.40 Moreover, the appeal for Hunt of an insolent Cockney type of ‘intellectual vernacular’ became acute just at the time he worked on Rimini The Battle of Waterloo, 1815, coincided with a resurgence of radical vernacular idioms in public discourse. Following government crackdowns against dissent in the 1790s and during the Napoleonic period, the movement for an ‘intellectual vernacular’ was set back and coopted, to an extent, by appeals to anti-Gallic patriotism in the lumpen English speech of ‘John Bull’. Linguistic standards of refined ‘correctness’ actually became more firmly established in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Barrell argues, ‘at the expense of whatever differences of provincial and idiosyncratic usage, so that the standard became indisputably recognized, if not universally adopted, as a national standard, confirming (as it was imagined) the unity of the state’.41 By 1815, however, with the Napoleonic threat gone, radical adaptations of the vernacular began to reappear in public discourse. Parody and what Smith calls a ‘wilfully, hilariously rude’ spirit characterise the most aggressive and influential of these linguistic forays—Cobbett’s Political Register articles in 1816, Hone’s anti-government parodies of 1816–23, including The Political House that Jack Built (1819), and T.J.Wooler’s The Black Dwarf (1817–24).42 When viewed against this background Hunt’s extravagance, his aesthetics of excess, appears as a subtle and original variation upon an established form of radical discourse. Hunt did not meet the ‘technical’ Cockney qualification of birth within the sound of Bow Bells and was certainly not a ‘vulgar’ London citizen. However, he was happy to be identified as a ‘Londoner and a Cockney’ and cheerfully enrolled Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope and Gray as predecessors.43 The ‘Cockney’ persona was something of an exaggerated artifice from the outset, corresponding to traditional Cockney habits of ostentatious self-fashioning. Hunt made Cockney uppitiness his own by assuming the role of a volatile insider, physically restrained by government yet gleefully capable of mocking state power, regal pomp and high culture. Hunt’s poetic strategy was not to attack head-on (which might describe his editorial role in the Examiner), but rather to ‘creolise’ from within. The effectiveness of this kind of radical infection from the inside registers graphically in Z’s opening tirade against scribbling ‘farm-servants’, ‘unmarried ladies’, ‘footmen’, ‘apothecaries’, all presumptuously aspiring to literary culture and, by implication, to a say in political life.44

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To orchestrate this performance, Hunt transformed his prison cell into a bower of bliss featuring wallpaper of trellised roses, a sky-blue painted ceiling dotted with clouds, Venetian blinds over the barred windows, portraits of Milton and John Hunt, a lute, a piano, busts of poets, bookcases, couches and flowers everywhere. Charles Lamb declared ‘there was no other such room except in a fairy tale’. 45 Completing the aura of enchantment, Hunt turned the yard outside into a pleasure garden, bordered by green palings adorned with a trellis and stocked profusely with what Hunt called a ‘flowery investment’. Ensconced in this improbable haven, the ‘amazing prisoner’, as Hunt christened himself, took pleasure in the surprise of those who glanced in or saw among his visitors prominent figures such as Bentham, Byron, Haydon, Hazlitt, Moore, Edgeworth and the Lambs. Relatives and friends joined Hunt at meals, in conversations, children’s games, poetry readings, music, singing, and drinking late into the night.46 What Hunt created in prison was a counter-court of sociality and wit (not deference and obsequiousness) presided over by a ‘Cockney King’, Leigh Hunt, who substituted classical music, art and poetry for the Prince Regent’s vulgar, noisy extravaganzas of fireworks, waterworks and banquets. While in prison Hunt combined the aesthetics represented by his decorated cell with the Examiners political agenda, to form a new oppositional poetics first and most fully realised in The Story of Rimini.47 Shamelessly appropriating and updating Dante’s story of Paulo and Francesca from the Inferno, Hunt compounded this insolent appearance before the public with his dedication to ‘MY DEAR BYRON’, which assumed inappropriate intimacy with an aristocratic superior; in confessing ignorance of Greek drama; and by declining to bother readers with notes to his learned allusions, while also advertising ‘the mighty extent of [his] information’ evident in ‘direct obligations’ to Chaucer, Bacon, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Pulci and others.48 In addition to breaking the closed couplets of Pope and the French school of versification’, he also determines to conduct the ‘still greater’ experiment of deploying ‘a free and idiomatic cast of language’.49 It is his use of the Cockney idiom, insinuated within an ornate tale of chivalry, that gives The Story of Rimini its unsettling and disconcerting presence. Hunt mingles high and low linguistic registers by reverting at moments of pathos or luxurious description to what many critics, unaware of his political aims, dismissed as the indecorous tone of a City shopkeeper. There is his quip, for instance, on The two divinest things this world has got,/ A lovely woman in a rural spot’ (III: 557–8), and the aside that Francesca ‘had stout notions on the marrying score’ (II: 27). The presence of this City banter throughout The Story of Rimini is accompanied by Cockneysounding rhymes where they would seem least appropriate, for example in lavish descriptions of medieval pageantry. Thus, in detailing the decorations at the court of Ravenna, Hunt rhymes ‘reply’ with ‘canopy’ so that ‘canopy’ must be pronounced ending in long ‘i’. As I noted earlier, altering standard vowel

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pronunciations has always been a trait of Cockney speech. When coupled, as here, with the Cockney tonal inclinations throughout The Story of Rimini, it may encourage a Cockney inflection of long ‘i’ as ‘Oi’, one of the most distinctive Cockney enunciations for centuries. The effect makes Hunt’s couplet sound something like this: ‘Another start of trumpets, with replOi/ And o’er the gates a sudden canopOi’ (I: 103–4). Hunt’s sketch of horses rhymes ‘eye’ and ‘awfully’ to the same effect: The mane hung sleekly, the projecting eye/That to the stander near looks awfully’ (I: 215–6). Still more ostentatiously, Hunt evokes the crowd’s acclamation of Giovanni, Lord of Rimini, with this resounding Cockney triplet: ‘Then burst the mob into jovial cry,/And largess! largess! claps against the sky,/ And bold Giovanni’s name, the lord of Rimini’ (II: 92–4; see Figure 7).50 Exquisitely, Hunt pairs ‘emerging’ and ‘Virgin’ during an otherwise elegant portrait of Francesca’s saintly character: ‘you might hear… Her gentle voice from out those shades [emergin’],/Singing the evening anthem to the Virgin’ (III: 496–9). In all of

Figure

7 ‘Cockney chivalry’. The opening scene of Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, from The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt (London and New York: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1860). By courtesy of St Andrews University Library.

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these examples we hear the sounds, the varieties of pronunciation, that Z had in mind when he deplored in Hunt’s poetry the ‘Cockney’ blend of jargon, forced rhymes and verbal licentiousness. The recurrence of Hunt’s Cockneyfied rhymes throughout The Story of Rimini—‘eye/gravity’ (I: 333–4), ‘eye/sensibility’ (III: 48–9), ‘eye/ tenderly’ (III: 178–9)—shows that they were not simply accidents or sloppy sight rhymes. Indeed, Hunt gives numerous examples of correct rhymes for the same words—‘see/Rimini’ (II: 235–6), ‘she/tenderly’ (III: 574–6), ‘eye/by’ (IV: 199–200)—indicating a strategic deployment of Cockney diction, usually at points of heightened emotion or fanciful reflection. The overall effect is not to parody high literature by narrating a tale of common life in inflated rhetoric, as in the manner of Shenstone’s famous Spenserian parody The Schoolmistress. Instead, Hunt’s parodic strategy extends the radical linguistic theory of his time, inserting ‘low’ speech into the register of high culture. That ‘creolising’ manoeuver goes far towards explaining Z’s tirades against the ‘vulgar insolence’ of Hunt’s poetic and political insinuations. 51 The charge of ‘vulgarity’ is perhaps the more readily understandable in view of Hunt’s calculated incorporation of the ‘low’, but Z’s use of ‘insolence’ was also applicable to the luxurious texture of verse in The Story of Rimini. The Story of Rimini paints scenes of expansive luxuriousness in run-on couplets, creating a sense of burgeoning profusion. Examples of this include the richly caparisoned horses of Paulo’s entourage ‘champing’ for freedom in their fiery ‘turbulence’ (I: 211–22); the upgathering of ‘cawing rooks’ bursting free above the troops returning to Rimini (II: 200–2); the nightingale’s ‘out-shot raptures…vent[ed] on the delicious hour’ (II: 222– 3). Hunt’s most lavish displays typically embellish scenes of moral and social transgression, figuratively complementing the scene in Canto III of Paulo’s and Francesca’s ‘illicit’ love. In this way Hunt’s poetic insolence— his luxurious profusion—forms a stylistic counterpart to the poem’s liberal social and sexual values. The scene begins with a profuse display of flowers ‘Heaped’ on that ‘enchanted ground’, proceeds through a description of erotic ‘sporting’ nymphs carved on a ‘beauteous’ temple within the bower, and concludes one hundred lines later with a catalogue of summer delights: …the low talking leaves, and that cool light The vines let in, and all that hushing sight Of closing wood seen through the opening door, And distant plash of waters tumbling o’er, And smell of citron blooms, and fifty luxuries more. (III: 512–16; my italics) In this luxurious scene, decorated with such quirky details as ‘talking leaves’, Paulo’s and Francesca’s consummation of ‘natural impulses’ is set

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against the ‘selfishness’ of social, political and religious authorities.52 In much the same way, the elaborate decoration of Hunt’s prison cell betokened his own luxuriously insolent resistance to oppression. Hunt makes this connection explicit when sketching Francesca’s private room, removed from Ravenna to Rimini, in terms reminiscent of his own bower in Horsemonger Lane Gaol: Furnished, like magic, from her own at home; The very books and all transported there, The leafy tapestry, and the crimson chair, The lute, the glass that told the shedding hours, The little urn of silver for the flowers…. (III: 151–5) Hunt’s prison scene of ‘cheerful’ opposition is cannily transferred to Rimini, where poor Francesca, too, has become the ‘possession’ of ‘the reigning brother’ Giovanni. The younger brother Paulo is, of course, on hand at this moment as Hunt’s representative—‘To be, and make, as happy as he could’ (III: 21, 99, 106). A careful reading of Hunt’s Cockney traits in The Story of Rimini (individual words, rhymes, luxurious descriptions) thus reveals the integrity and coherence of poetic practices that to many readers have seemed inept or misdirected. Hunt’s aesthetic of Cockney excess—‘fifty luxuries more’—also conducts, moreover, one of the most powerful contemporary political gestures in The Story of Rimini. In the autobiographical opening to canto III, Hunt’s leafy luxuries appear as imaginative alternatives to the ‘dull bars’ of the authorities confining him in prison. Introducing this section in the 1816 edition with the announcement that ‘[t]he preceding canto and a small part of the present, were written in prison’,53 Hunt outlines the contrast between things as they are, and what they could be: Sad is the strain, with which I chain my long And caged hours, and try my native tongue; Now too, while rains autumnal, as I sing, Wash the dull bars, chilling my sicklied wing, And all the climate presses on my sense; But thoughts it furnishes of things far hence, And leafy dreams affords me, and a feeling Which I should else disdain, tear-dipped and healing… (III: 3–10) So Hunt’s poetic luxuries, like the decoration of his cell, do not constitute a mode of escapism, but form part of a sustained effort to reimagine from within the iron centre of despotism, prejudice and self-interest a new liberated social order governed by art, beauty and sociability. Indeed, his

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bower scenes often figure contrasts between oppressive social codes and liberating transgressions, as in Paulo’s lingering gaze ‘through the bowering arch’ to the spot of his love tryst with Francesca: this occurs just before Paulo’s fatal combat in a duel with his brother, Giovanni (IV: 199– 208). Similarly, Hunt’s preference throughout The Story of Rimini for gorgeous chivalric pageantry over militarism—Paulo’s colourful entourage seems ‘harnessed’ for war, ‘[b]ut in their garbs of peace the train appears’ (I: 143–4)—does not represent a narrow aestheticism, or lingering Burkean attraction to aristocratic privilege, but rather a commitment to transform outworn creeds and social systems through art. John Keats would take these lessons to heart as he became a poet, and not simply to forget them later. Keats registered enthusiasm for Hunt’s poem in his sonnet of March 1817 ‘On The Story of Rimini’. He also showed the manuscripts of his two fragments, Specimen and Calidore to Hunt, who annotated them with obvious admiration.54 His hopes to win approval by emulating Hunt’s aesthetics can be measured by his direct appeal in Specimen to Hunt, code named ‘Libertas’, as a wronged political leader. Such a commitment to Hunt’s model is evident in the opening couplet of Specimen, where Keats utilises one of Hunt’s favourite Cockney rhyme words, ‘eye’, to form a rhyme with ‘chivalry’—so ironising his bid for the genre of medieval, specifically Spenserian, quest romance: ‘Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry,/ For large white plumes are dancing in mine eye’ (1–2). Similar rhyming pranks, marked positively by Hunt in the manuscripts, occur throughout Specimen and Calidore, such as ‘nigh/fearfully’, ‘by/invitingly’, ‘sky/ lingeringly’, and the thoroughly Cocknified ‘eye/luxury’. Such examples of ‘spoken Cockney jargon’ create a parodic effect, reinforced by the opening line of Calidore, which replaces Spenser’s heroic opening to The Faerie Queene, ‘A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine’, with the bathetic ‘Young Calidore is paddling o’er the lake’ (1). The intent here, like Hunt’s in The Story of Rimini, is not simply to mock literary tradition—Keats revered Spenser—but rather to demonstrate a calculated, intrusive familiarity, or casual intimacy, with sources of cultural authority hitherto considered off-limits for plebians who make rhymes in Cockney accents. Types like that, as Z tirelessly insists and my own Cockney taxi-driver confirms, are not supposed to know about chivalry, let alone presume to trespass into its literary lists. Throughout his early writings, Keats associated medieval chivalry with poetic achievement, and in the brief but surprisingly subtle medieval allegory of Calidore he took pains to champion Calidore’s preference for the luxurious aesthetics of chivalry over its violent codes and practices. Keats prepares the ground for this emphasis by associating the poem’s first distinctively medieval attribute, a ruined and ‘lonely turret’, with a violent past now ‘shatter’d and outworn’ (38–9). Calidore, oblivious to this symbol of ‘long lost grandeur’ (40), shows more interest in the leafy delights of the

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bower surrounding it: ‘sequester’d leafy glades,/That through the dimness of their twilight show/Large dock leaves, spiral foxgloves…or the silvery stem/Of delicate birch trees’ (47–51). Dwelling rapturously in this Huntian nook, Calidore finds its luxurious atmosphere replicated in the modern castle he does eventually enter. Not so much a seat of power as a garden of aesthetic delights, this castle features a series of ‘wonder [s] out of fairy land’ (94): the ‘soft luxury’ of beautiful maidens; armour of ‘some splendid weed’ too dexterously wrought to be made of ‘hard, and heavy steel’; waving plumes ‘[h]igh as the berries of a wild ash tree’ (93–114). Calidore’s aesthetic education deepens when he enters ‘a pleasant chamber’, reminiscent of Hunt’s prison cell, whose luxuries include ‘sweet-lipp’d ladies’ and flowery borders around open casement windows through which stream the songs of nightingales and the ‘incense from the lime-tree flower’ (134–55; one of the luxuries in Hunt’s Rimini was the ‘smell of citron blooms’). Calidore burns at first to hear of martial prowess; but his mentor, Sir Gondibert, signals a different emphasis by ‘doff[ing] his shining steel’ in favour of the ‘free, and airy feel/Of a light mantle’ (138– 40), and conversation turns to poetry, not military valour. These recurrent swerves from chivalric heroism into aesthetic pleasure have struck many of Keats’s readers as immature indulgence or solipsistic escapism. Considered in relation to Hunt’s Story of Rimini, however, they can be read as Keats’s sustained effort, following Hunt, to imagine alternative social communities; or, more precisely, to reconstitute from within the castle of outworn creeds a new social order based on art, freedom and the generous exercise of a liberating sociability. Tracing Keats’s mastery of Cockney strategies in the early poems may lead us to conclude that the Keats of 1816–17 was more accomplished as a poet and a political thinker than has generally been realised. And that recognition can alert us to Keats’s increasingly complex applications of Hunt’s example in his later poetry. Lending additional credence to Jeffrey Cox’s argument that Keats scholars have overstated the break with Hunt, so missing important examples of ‘Cockney classicism’ in Keats’s later works,55 the Cockney rhymes of 1816 recur not infrequently in the later poetry—in parodies like The Jealousies (‘eyes/gallantries’, ‘I/instantly’ [758– 60, 780–2]) and also in weightier poems like Lamia (‘eye/utterly’, ‘fly/ philosophy’, ‘by/thoughtfully’ [II: 299–300, 229–30; I: 315–16]), The Eve of St. Agnes (‘eyes/phantasies’, ‘eye/dreamingly’, ‘dyes/heraldries’ [287–8, 305–6, 212–14]) and rather spectacularly in the ‘eye/Poesy’ rhyme of ‘Ode on Indolence’ (25–30). Critical work remains to be done on the persistence of Huntian inflections in Keats’s poems of 1819, on which his canonical reputation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was based. The extent to which Keats goes beyond Hunt’s example in the earlier works may also prompt reconsideration of one of the dominant motifs of his later poetry: the tension between the claims of material reality and the creative imagination, often

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figured in terms of a split attraction to the ‘noisy world’ and to bowery retreats or ‘pleasant chamber[s]’ like those of Lamia’s enchanted palace (Lamia II: 33; Calidore 134). The relevance of Keats’s early manner to this later plot lies in his extension of Hunt’s medieval scenarios to fit his own allegory of creative development in Calidore, whose drama of maturation Keats associated with his own poetic growth. The symmetry between Calidore’s experience of the bower/world conflict and Keats’s later adaptations of that theme complicates the so-called ‘escapist’ tendencies of his poetry, revealing Hunt’s distinctive ‘spoken jargon’ as vitally present in poems formerly thought to demonstrate that Keats had outgrown Hunt’s example.56

Notes 1 ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. I’, BM (October 1817), pp. 38–41, at p. 39. 2 Autobiography, III: p. 187 3 ‘Letter from Z. to Leigh Hunt, King of the Cockneys’, BM (May 1818), pp. 196– 201, at p. 196; The Cockney School of Poetry. No. III’, BM ( July 1818), pp. 453– 56, at p. 456. 4 ‘Cockney School of Poetry. No. IV’, BM (August 1818), pp. 519–24, at p. 524. 5 Barnette Miller, Leigh Hunt’s Relationship with Byron, Shelley and Keats (New York: Columbia University Press, 1910), p. 24. 6 Graham Hough, The Romantic Poets (London: Hutchinson, 1957), pp. 160–1. 7 Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (London: Chatto & Windus, 1979), pp. 77, 61, hereafter Bate. 8 James Thompson, Leigh Hunt (Boston: Twayne, 1977), pp. 31, 33, 34, hereafter Thompson. 9 Edgecombe, pp. 54, 68, 82. 10 ‘Cockney School of Poetry. No IV’, pp. 92, 93. 11 Bate, p. 77. Jeffrey Cox elaborates this traditional critical position: ‘In order, then, to save from Cockney contamination “Hyperion”, the odes, and the later narrative poems, Keatsians have been willing to see Keats’s “early” work—and particularly his Poems of 1817—as an unfortunate adolescent flirtation with Hunt’s muse, or, more simply, as bad poetry’. See Cox, p. 83. 12 Jerome McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, Modern Language Notes, XCIV (1979), pp. 988–1032; Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (London: Blackwell, 1988). 13 William Keach, ‘Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style’, SiR, XXV (1986), pp. 182–96, at p. 183. 14 Keach notes with caution, for instance, that some of Keats’s early stylistic eccentricities may be purely aesthetic and even ‘anti-political’ (p. 190). There are also ‘level [s] of performance where the specific political context of Keats’s Cockney couplets ceases to be immediately instructive’ (p. 196). 15 Keach emphasises this extreme rhyme (p. 191). 16 K&H. See reviews of this collection by David Perkins, The Wordsworth Circle, XXVII (Autumn 1996), pp. 203–5, and Alan Bewell, K-SJ, XLVII (1998), pp. 184–5. 17 ‘Introduction’ in The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Ronald

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30 31 32

33 34 35 36

Greg Kucich M.Ryan and Ronald A.Sharp (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), pp. 1, 8. The phrase ‘flatter’d state’ appears in Keats’s sonnet commemorating Hunt’s release, 2 February 1815. All quotations from Keats’s poetry are taken from PJK. Miriam Allott suggests that Keats’s doggerel ‘Give me women, wine and snuff’ was composed soon after publication of Rimini. She cites Robert Gittings’s argument for the influence of Hunt’s translation of Anacreon’s Ode 54, published in E, 31 March 1816; see Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), p. 28. ‘Cockney School of Poetry. No I’, p. 33. See also OED, ‘insolent’, esp. definition 3. See Greg Kucich, “The Wit in the Dungeon”: Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries’, European Romantic Review, X (1999), pp. 242–53. Autobiography, I: p. 24. Autobiography, I: pp. 3–4, 20. Autobiography, I: p. 97. Autobiography, I: p. 133. ‘Cockney School of Poetry. No I’, p. 33. In his study of British accents, J.C.Wells notes that the ‘true Cockney is supposed to be someone born within the sound of Bow Bells’; Accents of English 2. The British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 302; hereafter Wells. See Eva Siversten, Cockney Phonology (New York: Humanities Press, 1960), pp. 2– 3. hereafter Siversten; Julian Franklyn, The Cockney: A Survey of London Life and Language (London: André Deutsche, 1953), p. 236, hereafter Franklyn; Wells, p. 319. Gareth Stedman Jones, The “Cockney” and the Nation, 1780–1988’, in Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800, ed. David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 272–324, at p. 283; hereafter Jones, ‘Cockney’. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (2 vols, London: W.Straham, 1755–6). Samuel Pegge, Anecdotes of the English Language-chiefly regarding the local dialect of London and its Environs-whence it will appear that the Natives of the Metropolis have corrupted the Language of their Ancestors (2nd edn, London: J. Nichols, 1814), p. 4. Walker explains: ‘For though the pronunciation of London is certainly erroneous in many words, yet, upon being compared with that of any other place, it is undoubtedly the best; that is, not only the best by courtesy, and because it happens to be the pronunciation of the capital, but best by a better title; that of being more generally received’. A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (London: G.G.J. and J.Robinson, 1791), p. xiii. Jones, ‘Cockney’, pp. 280–1. Rev. David MacRae, National Humour (1904; Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1916), p. 196. ‘Letter from Z.’, pp. 197, 200–01; ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No I’, p. 40; ‘The Cockney School of Poetry. No III’, p. 453. Notions of nineteenth-century Cockney speech eccentricities, popularised by Dickens and Shaw, include dropping initial ‘h’ in words like ‘ave; elision of final ‘g’ from words endin’ with ‘ing’; transposition of ‘w’ and ‘v’. Types of initial ‘h’ and final ‘g’ dropping were common in regional accents, as well as in Regency aristocratic slang. Shaw, bolstered by his studies in phonetics, came closer than Dickens to the actual Cockney speech of his time in characters like Drinkwater from Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (though modern linguists find Shaw’s Cockney inaccurate and ‘exaggerated’ (Wells, p. 334)). One of the most notable attributes of Cockney speech, most linguists now agree, involves the tendency to

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mix vowel sounds, confounding the differences between long ‘a’, for instance, and long ‘i’ (standard ‘paint’ becomes Cockney ‘pint’), or between short ‘e’ and short ‘i’ (standard ‘get’ becomes Cockney ‘git’). Commenting on this Cockney penchant to cross and confuse standard vowel distinctions, Siversten quotes W.Matthews from Cockney Past and Present ‘As a further tendency of the dialect to centralize back vowels and diphthongs, many sounds which are widely separated in standard speech become closer to one another in Cockney…. The general effect of these tendencies is to make the dialect rather confused’. See Siversten, p. 30. Franklyn, pp. 16–17, traces this pattern back at least to the later eighteenth century. Franklyn, p. 301. Franklyn gives this example of tour-de-force Cockney rhyming slang: ‘In a public-house, under normal conditions, a request for a pint of “brown” or “wallop” will be made; but in the presence of an “observer”, when the Cockney uses his rhyming slang excessively and ostentatiously, partly to mystify and partly to establish his own superiority, the request will be for a Walter Scott (pot) of pig’s ear (beer). He may add that he will not get elephant’s trunk—or he may abbreviate to elephant’s—(drunk) on it because it is half fisherman’s daughter (water); but if he does he can be sure his trouble and strife (wife) will soon pick him up off the Rory O’More (floor) and get him into uncle Ned (bed)’ (p. 293). Cockney coded speech and rhyming slang persists in recent forms, such as popular television shows like EastEnders, bands like the punk group ‘Cockney Rejects’ and their hit single, ‘Oi! Oi! Oi!’, and websites, including The Cockney Museum’, devoted to ‘interpreting’ Cockney slang and culture: go to www.cockneymuseum.u-net.com/cockney%20museum%20web%20site/and www.bio.nrc.ca/cockney/. ‘Ideas of language and ideas about suffrage’, Smith argues, ‘shared the central concerns of establishing which groups of people merited participation in public life…. [L]ate eighteenth-century theories of language were centrally and explicitly concerned with class division’. The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. vii–viii, hereafter Smith. Barrell analyses ‘the potency and importance of the analogy of language and politics in the [eighteenth] century’. He elaborates: ‘[t]he stability of the language of the polite, and the stability of their constitution, are alike threatened by the mutability of the people, who properly considered, have no interest in either matter. They are no part of the true language community, which is now a closed circle of the polite whose language is now presented as durable and permanent; and they form no part of the political community’; English Literature in History 1730–80. An Equal Wide Survey (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), pp. 167, 158, hereafter Barrell. Smith, p. x. Rimini, p. xv; Foliage, p. 10. Barrell, p. 175. Smith, p. 110, adds that later eighteenth-century challenges to hierarchical standards of refined English ‘had a limited effectiveness, for although they enabled more of the [general reading public] to contribute to public debates, they did not discredit ideas about language which justified class division nor alter the assessment of language by the literati’. Smith, p. 154. Steven Jones introduces his fine chapter on Wooler’s The Black Dwarf by emphasising this proliferation of radical, strategically vulgar satire in the post-Waterloo years: ‘Far below the relatively respectable level even of Coleridge’s newspaper satires of the 1790s, a cheap radical press had been thriving in London once again since the end of the war…. Wooler’s Black Dwarf…openly engages in a troubling display of the volatility of the modes it incorporates—sentimental and satirical, those associated with “high” as well as “low” discourses’; see Satire and Romanticism (New York: St Martin’s Press,

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Greg Kucich 2000), pp. 77, 79. See also Kevin Gilmartin’s illuminating chapter on radical print culture, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early NineteenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 65–113. Autobiography, III: pp. 186–7. Z, ‘Cockney School of Poetry. No IV.’, p. 519. Autobiography, II: p. 148. Hunt recounts his prison sojourn in Autobiography, II: pp. 136–59. For biographical accounts see Blunden and Anne Blainey, Immortal Boy: A Portrait of Leigh Hunt (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985) and ‘ “The Wit in the Dungeon”: Leigh Hunt in Surrey Gaol’, Books at Iowa, XXXVII (April 1981), pp. 9–14. Hunt also indulges in colloquial language in his parodic ‘Miscellaneous Sketches’ for E from 1808 on, and toys with slang-like banter in the satirical anapaestic measures of Feast. These could be viewed as practical training for the more flamboyant Cockneyism of Rimini. Rimini, pp. v, xii, xv. Rimini, p. xv. The common phonetic symbol for Cockney long T is a (see Siversten pp. 233– 62). Franklyn offers a popular transcription of this sound as ‘Oi’ (p. 255), also a notorious Cockney imprecation. Shaw, in The Simplified Spelling Reform, offers a different popular transcription of the same sound as ‘Awy’ (quoted by Franklyn, p. 226). It should be noted that scholars of Cockney phonetics do not give any examples of words like ‘canopy’ or ‘chivalry’ receiving the ‘Oi’ pronunciation of the word ‘I’. Siversten gives a more accurate Cockney pronunciation of the ‘y’ sound in ‘poultry’, for instance, as something like the ‘i’ sound in ‘hid’ (p. 247). My point, however, is not that Hunt produces authentic Cockney speech but rather that he pushes language into a more exaggerated form of ‘hyperCockney’. The effect is not unlike the hyperbolic stage Cockney of the nineteenth century, or the literary Cockney of Dickens and Shaw, though the political function of cultural destabilisation is markedly different from these examples. Z, ‘Letter from Z to Leigh Hunt’, p. 85. For an excellent analysis of Z’s paranoid style, see Kim Wheatley, ‘The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt’, NineteenthCentury Literature, XLVII (1992), pp. 1–31. See also Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, ‘Killing the Cockneys: Blackwood’s Weapons of Choice Against Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats’, K-SJ, XLVII (1998), pp. 87–107. See Hunt’s discussion of Rimini in the Preface to Foliage, p. 17. Rimini, p. 43. The manuscripts marked by Hunt are transcripts of both poems in Tom Keats’s copybook, now at Harvard. Jack Stillinger lists Hunt’s markings in the Tom Keats transcriptions of both poems. See PJK, pp. 548–9). See Cox, pp. 146–86. Thompson notes that the bowers of Rimini anticipate the ‘Keatsian richness’ of Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes, but makes no mention of the political dimension of Hunt’s stylistic influence (p. 33).

8

‘Even now while I write’ Leigh Hunt and Romantic spontaneity Michael O’Neill

‘An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius’: though Edward Young’s assertion in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) foreshadows theories of organic form, spontaneous risings of originality were the result of much contrivance in poetry of the Romantic period.1 It is intriguing that Home Tooke, friend of Leigh Hunt’s father, picks out the very word ‘spontaneous’ as arrived at unspontaneously. Its creation as an adjective associated with the substantive ‘will’ exemplifies a practice of which he disapproves: ‘In English, instead of adjectiving our own substantives, we have borrowed, in immense numbers, adjectived signs from other languages’.2 Tooke’s philological quirkiness moves into connection with the custom-flouting spirit of the Romantic age by revealing, as Hazlitt points out, that ‘all language was a masquerade of words’.3 If Tooke demystifies the supposed connection of words with things but exalts the thinginess of words, the Romantics defamiliarise the experience of reading by tearing the veil from the apparent moment of composition.4 Keats does so in sombre mood at the close of the introduction to The Fall of Hyperion, where he holds out ‘this warm scribe my hand’ (I: 18; quoted from PJK) towards his reader. Byron, more flippantly, no sooner starts canto III of Don Juan with an epic formula—‘Hail, Muse!’—than he undercuts it, ‘et cetera’ (III: i, 1; BPW, V: p. 161). This writing to the moment is an artful illusion, but the Romantics use the illusion to create a sense that their poems fulfil laws and articulate insights that exist only in the process of composition. There is, certainly, in the poetry and prose of Leigh Hunt a fascination with the quick of writing and much art in the way he devises an impression of spontaneity.5 Two examples, the first from Hunt’s poetry, the second from his prose, display his sophisticated understanding of naturalness and spontaneity.6 The opening of ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ squares up to its mythological subject while throwing away any poetic stilts: The moist and quiet morn was scarcely breaking, When Ariadne in her bower was waking; Her eyelids still were closing, and she heard

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But indistinctly yet a little bird, That in the leaves o’erhead, waiting the sun, Seemed answering another distant one. (ll. 1–6) Given the well-known nature of the legend, the reader knows that the poem will soon have to deal with the fact that Theseus deserts Ariadne. The poet, as though conscious of this expectation, starts with the softest of pedals. He opens with a feminine rhyme that establishes a connection between the ‘scarcely breaking’ morn and the hardly waking Ariadne. Even in such details as the almost pulseless enjambment of ‘But indistinctly yet’, carried over from and qualifying ‘she heard’, the poetry enforces a contrast between the character’s unawareness and the narrator’s foreknowledge: a foreknowledge that shows in the ironic, or soon to be ironic, account of the ‘little bird’ ‘answering another distant one’.7 Whereas the deserted bird in Whitman’s ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ stirs in the listening boy an awareness of sorrows and unsatisfied desire that will hurt him into his own poetic song, at the start of ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ Hunt implies, without insisting on, a contrast between the bird apparently ‘answering’ another and the woman about to discover that she has been abandoned. The proleptic intelligence here operates with a delicacy that eschews the concentration at which Keats excels in, say, this line and a half from Isabella: ‘So the two brothers and their murder’d man/Rode past fair Florence’ (ll. 209–10; quoted from PJK). Hunt praised the Keatsian passage for the ‘fine daring anticipation’ in ‘their murder’d man’ of Lorenzo’s fate.8 But his mode of ‘anticipation’ in ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ has its own fineness and daring. Crucially, Hunt tilts the story towards a happy ending in a spirit of exuberant resistance to sorrow, and to poetic representations that are merely ‘self-embittering’ (such as Byron’s, damningly praised in a note to The Feast of the Poets for ‘an intensity of feeling, which appears to seek relief in it’s own violence’ (Feast, p. 131)). Bacchus-Hunt is a better lover-poet than TheseusByron to the degree that ‘a noble spirit’s caress,/Full of sincerity, and mind, and heart,/Out-relishes mere fire and self-embittering art’ (ll. 341–3). For a moment, the rhyme points up a quarrel between ‘heart’ and ‘art’ which fascinates Hunt: a quarrel in which ‘heart’ is the winner, yet only in a poem that uses ‘art’ to downgrade ‘art’. As so often with Hunt, his easy manner is fraught with political implications and can sharpen into mockery, as it does when he considers various reasons for Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne, including the notion (which he discredits) that ‘Bacchus in the true old way,/ A dream, advised him sternly not to stay,/ But go and cut up nations limb by limb,/And leave the lady and the bower to him’ (ll. 52–5). That penultimate line shows an acute ear for the subversive potential of an idiom flirting with slang, while the last line makes the self-interest of the imagined adviser only too apparent.9

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Again Hunt, the most sensitively attuned close reader of poetry (with Coleridge) in English in the nineteenth century, is attentive to the operations of ‘Variety in Uniformity’. Writing in ‘An Answer to the Question “What Is Poetry?”’ (hereafter ‘What Is Poetry?’) of the opening of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, he comments that ‘Everything is diversified according to the demand of the moment’, paying tribute to the poem’s impression of going where it wishes, of having time enough, in lines emphasised by Hunt, to dwell on the unique, the singular: The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. (I: 49–52) ‘And yet’, Hunt goes on, using a locution that calls out ‘Coleridge’ (as Seamus Perry has shown), ‘we feel that the whole is one and of the same character, the single and sweet unconsciousness of the heroine making all the rest seem more conscious, and ghastly, and expectant. It is thus that versification itself becomes part of the sentiment of the poem’ (italics in original).10 Hunt’s insight warrants his emphases. He has explained how Coleridge’s secretive narratorial manner is at one with submission to ‘the demand of the moment’ and with an overall authorial ‘consciousness’. An instance of how Hunt is able to make the ‘versification itself…part of the sentiment of the poem’ is his bending of the verse epistle to his concern with mental process. In ‘To Thomas Moore’ (originally published in the Examiner as ‘Harry Brown to His Cousin Thomas Brown, Jun. Letter 1’ (E, 30 June 1816, pp. 409–10)) his tone is less conversational than knowingly garrulous: ‘when chattering to you, I’ve a something about me, /That makes all my spirits come dancing from out me’ (11. 9–10). ‘Thomas Brown, Jun.’ alludes to Thomas Moore, who wrote The Twopenny Post Bag (1814) under the name, and Hunt shares with Moore an ability to tweak authority’s nose. But his mood is friskier; we are brought closer than in Moore to the changeable pleasures of writing and to writing’s pleasure in the changeable. Even as Hunt concedes that he is ‘chattering’, there is an air of headway created by the ‘dancing’ metre and feminine rhyme; that air would be bumptious were it not for the writer’s infectious assumption that the pleasure he takes will (or should) be shared by his addressee and reader. Hunt’s egotism is designedlynot sublime, but laid on the line, and yet, to the degree that it is a representation of self-display, it arms itself against attack by throwing down any shield. In his handling of the familiar epistle the poet brings the genre smartly but not impertinently up to date. He cleverly tricks out what you suspect to be rhetorical formulae as though they were sudden promptings of impulse: the following use of occupatio is an example:11

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But at present, for reasons I’ll give when we meet, I shall spare you the trouble,—I mean to say treat; And yet how can I touch, and not linger a while, On the spot that haunted my youth like a smile? (ll. 21–4) From the disclosure of a privacy that cannot as yet be disclosed, Hunt slides into a courteous demurral (‘spare you the trouble’) that smoothly redefines itself as a pleasure postponed: the ‘treat’ he will not talk about is not cloying because of the nimbly alliterative way he moves from ‘trouble’ to ‘treat’. Then he abandons his coyness, and makes space for a poetic ‘lingering’ that allows the poem to gather pace. It does so by means of a catalogue of largely natural sights and sounds which induce the desire to ‘loiter and sing’ (l. 30). When Hunt makes explicit the fact that he is engaged in composition, he places writing in a suspended ‘while’ that allows for transactions between self and reality: ‘Even now while I write, I’m half stretched on the ground/With a cheeksmoothing air coming taking me round’ (ll. 35–6). Keats, for one, responded to this putting into the foreground of the encounter between circumambient world and composing poet: in ‘To My Brother George’ (sonnet), he asserts, ‘E’en now, dear George, while this for you I write’ (l. 9), and in ‘To My Brother George’ (epistle), he offers another imitation of Hunt’s breaking through into the present: ‘These things I thought /While, in my face, the freshest breeze I caught./E’en now I’m pillowed on a bed of flowers’ (ll. 121–3).12 In the lines quoted from Hunt, the almost otiose phrase ‘coming taking’ is suggestive of goings-on outside the poet’s control, even as he seeks to register them. In the Examiner version of the text, it becomes clearer that Hunt’s passivity coexists with alertness to the implications of creating a poem. He glosses an allusion (in line 40) to Anacreon’s ‘delicious little ode’ in a way that makes the Greek poet’s treatment of a grasshopper a forerunner of his own attitude to insects: ‘enjoying the creature’s enjoyment, without any of the pettier assumptions of humanity’ (E, 30 June 1816, p. 410). Yet if this comment anticipates the practice of such twentieth-century poets as William Carlos Williams, with his dislike of imposed significance, Hunt is happy to flaunt his role as the spinner of comparisons: an insect crosses his paper, ‘Looking just like the traveller lost in the snow,—/Till he reaches the writing,—and then, when he’s eyed it,/What nodding, and touching, and coasting beside it!’ (ll. 50– 2). Briefly the insect is a bewildered reader or outsmarted critic, a suggestion brought out by the subsequent comparison with ‘Giffard’ (1. 58), and Hunt implies that, in the best sense, his easy writing makes hard reading; the reader needs to be on the qui vive. ‘Vivacious, smart, witty, changeful, sparkling, and learned’: this intendedly adverse characterisation in Constable’s Scots Magazine of the style which Keats inherited from Hunt hints at the achievement of a poem

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such as ‘To Thomas Moore’.13 In ‘Harry Brown’s Letters to His Friends‘, Hunt hits on a mode which gives him scope to exhibit the qualities described by the Edinburgh Magazine. In the fourth letter, printed in the Examiner on 21 July 1816, his capacity to turn his smartness and wit to political advantage is evident. The epigraph reveals a preoccupation with how language can be abused (‘Oh what fine thoughts! What lovely phraseology!’), and turns against Hunt’s political opponents the charge sometimes levelled at him, that he is a mere savourer and relisher of words. Appropriately for a poem whose buoyantly forthcoming manner draws attention to itself, the letter is concerned with ‘the puzzle I’ve had to make out/Our great leading Statesman and what they’re about’. The poem adroitly handles dissonant registers; so, the pomp of ‘great leading Statesmen’ is deflated by the dismissive ‘what they’re about’. After describing the odd appearances of ‘Statesmen’, Hunt backtracks, suggesting that appearances may be misleading, but he does so only to remind the reader of the harsh treatment he has himself received: ‘And many great heads have been queer ones to view,/There’s myself, for example, so slender and pale,/You’d swear me a rhymester just come out of jail’. Hunt aligns himself jokily with ‘great heads’ and creates himself as a character within his poem. A high point of the poem is a cameo parody of a figure Hunt calls ‘the lavender man’, possibly Castlereagh, mocked for his boring oratory by Thomas Moore in ‘The Insurrection of the Paper. A Dream’. This figure’s style of political speech is improvisation at its bluffing worse and is brilliantly mimicked by Hunt’s use of free indirect discourse: ‘He was sure—and he hoped—and he look’d to that day,—/And this was a question, he really must say’. The stress, there, on ‘really’ catches the speaker’s bogus seriousness. Hunt continues: He went on with more of the same kind of talking, And minced as he went, like a lounger in walking, For Commons was Cummins, Discussion Diskissin, (Thus, hushing, we know, is sometimes next to hissing) And cutting himself unawares with his dull edge, His Knowledge he called, very handsomely, Nullidge. (Poem quoted from E, 21 July 1816, pp. 456–7) The pretensions of accent brought out by Hunt’s emphases are made to ‘cut’ against the speaker. Hunt’s comic rhymes breed matter, ‘Diskissin’ prompting the ‘hissing’ from which Hunt refrains, but which the speaker warrants. The passage culminates in the identification of the speaker’s ‘Knowledge’ with the nullity implied by ‘Nullidge’. Moore’s The Fudge Family in Paris (1818) involves, in its second letter, highly accomplished satire at Castlereagh’s expense, mocking his odd turns of phrase: ‘I must embark into the feature/On which this letter chiefly hinges’ (Moore’s emphases).14 Yet Moore lacks Hunt’s ability to alter tone, the quicksilver production, for

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instance, at the end of the verse paragraph after the parody quoted above of something like an unsatirised positive: ‘But not a new thing, nor a good, did they say,/Not a phrase which your memory would carry away’ (E, 21 July 1816, pp. 457). The slipped-in ‘nor a good’ pulls off the satirical mask with quiet force. Hunt’s ‘spontaneity’ is, and is designed to be understood as, an elusive and a knotty matter. It would be too simple to see him as an exemplar of the ‘meltfresh, newpainted, all-in-the-moment living quality’ which Tom Paulin admires.15 In a verse letter ‘To William Hazlitt’ Hunt praises Hazlitt, his close friend and intermittent sparring partner, for his ‘tact intellectual’, where ‘tact’ takes on its full etymological force of a capacity for ‘touch’, as the second line brings out: ‘whose tact intellectual is such/That it seems to feel truth, as one’s fingers do touch’ (ll. 1–2). That captures the fidelity to ‘intellectual’ feeling offered by Hazlitt, yet one may feel that there is a ‘tact intellectual’ in Hunt which differs from Hazlitt’s. The latter’s prose takes no prisoners; near-staccato sentences pulse vividly into life. Almost merciless in their determination to bite to the core of their subject, Hazlitt’s writings sometimes give the impression of an essayist half-blinded by his insights, unable, for the duration of the essay, to give opposing views any quarter. Hunt’s prose, by contrast, is sinuous, often gracefully aware of the positions it is taking, able to bring various ideas into play. Hazlitt risks confinement in an attitude, for all his agile inventiveness; Hunt can come perilously close to being on both sides of an argument. Spontaneity for Hazlitt lies in the energy with which he tracks and devours his quarry; for Hunt, in his prose, it shows in a readiness to qualify, to change tack. In ‘Mr. Hazlitt and the Utilitarians’, Hunt understands Hazlitt’s dislike of Utilitarianism in one breath (‘we confess that in a high and refined sense we agree with him’), while in the next, purporting to summarise, he argues out of existence the distinction between delight and utility: It was thus Mr. Hazlitt probably felt, though he did not exactly say it: and, indeed, we are sure that he felt so, from other things that he did say, and from the zest with which he delighted to fetch out the utilities of poetry and painting, professedly as such, and as rescuing the other utilities from grossness’. The sentence gathers, goes back on itself, and proceeds with a courteous wish to reconstrue and reconcile that is at once forthright and full of stylistic politesse. (In much the same way, Hunt, in his verse epistle to Byron, attempts to reconcile the poet with his recently estranged wife, who is described as ‘An anxious angel face, pretending ire’ (E, 28 April 1816, pp. 266–7 (p. 267)). ‘Mr. Hazlitt and the Utilitarians’ (published in 1830) is the more powerful for beginning as an elegy for Hunt’s friend. Its thoughts about Hazlitt’s burial place sharpen by way of an exclamatory parenthesis into implicit reflection on Hunt’s activity as elegist: ‘Mr. Hazlitt’s death (what strange words do these seem to us to write!)’ Hunt carries his obituarist-like duties lightly but responsibly. Whereas Hazlitt ‘does’ people with a caricaturist’s burin (think of his acidic portrait of Shelley in ‘On

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Paradox and Common-place’), Hunt, as here, shows himself able both to empathise and to stand his ground: If Mr. Hazlitt sometimes vented his temper in a book apparently for temper’s sake, and could seldom forbear repeating a shrewd observation or a bit of truth, though it told against you, no man was readier to do justice to what he thought a merit.16 In Swift’s Battle of the Books the spider spinning webs out of its entrails is employed as an image of the modern writer’s over-busy, futile toils. Swift’s handling of the image is sardonic. In ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ Shelley reclaims it as an emblem of the poet ‘spinning still round this decaying form’ (1. 6; quoted from SPP), spinning what will bring him ‘immortality’ (1. 14). For all its conversational ease, Shelley’s poem, which contains a portrait of Hunt (ll. 209–25), sets its sights on an aesthetic permanence that his literary ally seems nonchalantly to overlook. Huntian spontaneity quivers like a spider’s web, and it is fitting that one of his finest uses of a poetics of spontaneity occurs in ‘To a Spider Running across a Room’. The poem participates in the ‘scuttling’ (l. 3) movement of the spider, delighting in the play of mind sparked off by the sight of the insect ‘running at this rate/Over the perplexing desert of a mat’ (ll. 1–2), where ‘this’ puts us up close to the event and ‘perplexing’ implies the sympathy (evident in the lively description) which is overtly withheld until later in the poem; then, Hunt seizes his satirical chance, pointing out that ‘The vermin’s a frank vermin, after all’ (l. 34), unlike the poet’s various targets. Hunt rides his couplets like a surfer, achieving an improbable alliance between playful and serious impulses that is the more engaging for always threatening to give one or the other the upper hand. Discussing the inception of The Story of Rimini, Louis Landré helpfully alludes to Hunt’s own account in his Autobiography in which the poet writes: ‘I was very happy; and looking among my books for some melancholy theme of verse, by which I could steady my felicity, I unfortunately chose the subject of Dante’s famous episode’.17 Landré invites us to note that ‘le choix du theme de Rimini…n’a rien de spontané; le poème procède d’une inspiration assez aitincielle’ (Landré, II: p. 265). But that antithesis between the spontaneous and the artificial is cut too incisively. Hunt’s prose captures, in the sensitively cadenced near-pentameter of ‘by which I could steady my felicity’, a combination of the designed and the unconstrained. The combination is one that his writing frequently communicates. In the passage from the Autobiography retrospection discovers an understated but ironic doubling. Hunt ‘unfortunately chose’ a subject in a way that wryly mirrors the tragically unfortunate choice of reading matter made by Paolo and Francesca. Dante’s ill-starred couple are damned for their choice. Hunt represents himself as ‘not critically aware, that to enlarge upon a subject which had been treated with exquisite sufficiency, and to his immortal

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renown, by a great master, was not likely, by any merit of detail, to save a tyro in the art from the charge of presumption’. But he quickly reasserts the poem’s worth by arguing that ‘the enjoyment which led me into the superfluity was manifest, and so far became its own warrant’.18 That self-defence is itself an instance of Hunt’s readiness to catch explanations on the wing: a readiness which nerves his act of creative ‘presumption’. Huntian spontaneity is the product of interacting, often counterbalancing impulses. In the Autobiography he writes of his way of dealing with illness, ‘Unfortunately, I had a tendency to extremes in selftreatment’. As with his depiction of choosing the subject matter of The Story of Rimini, ‘unfortunately’ checks yet prompts deeper investigation into the operations of choice. Hunt’s recommendations of health, which can seem cheerily facile, take on a certain dignity when one realises that ‘health’, for him, is a hardwon escape from, born out of experience of, ‘extremes’. The reader who finds Hunt Skimpole-like in his conduct and writing is paying insufficient attention to the fear underpinning the ‘seventh’ of the ‘conclusions from sufferings of all kinds’ which he draws for the benefit of any readers who may ‘happen to need it’: ‘That the value of cheerful opinions is inestimable; that they will retain a sort of heaven round a man, when everything else might fail him’.19 ‘A sort of’ may at first look trite, but it bravely concedes that, in such matters, human beings must do as best they can to find solace. To the extent that Skimpole is based on Hunt, Dickens offers a ruthless character assassination. He emphasises the irresponsible self-concern at the bottom of Skimpole’s ‘vivacious candour’ about his ‘incapacity for details and worldly affairs’.20 Hunt’s humanism, by contrast, is supportive of self and others, and replaces a traditional trust in providence. Its delight in poetic ‘finery’ is inaccurately stigmatised as ‘ “shabby-genteel”’, Byron’s class-sensitive and class-ridden term (held in the tongs of quotation marks) for the ‘New School of poets’, since it is never without an awareness of the darker side of things.21 Reviewing Keats’s 1817 volume, Hunt quoted lines from ‘Sleep and Poetry’ which he took to criticise ‘the morbidity that taints the productions of the Lake Poets’ (E, 13 July 1817, p. 443). But the passage, cited under the heading ‘Happy Poetry Preferred’, may well have Byron in its sights; it depicts a poetry that ‘feeds upon the burrs/And thorns of life; forgetting the great end/Of poesy, that it should be a friend/To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man’ (ll. 244–7; see E, 13 July 1817, p. 444).22 These lines use their gravely fluent enjambments to concede a qualified tribute, even as they make their criticism: poesy’s ‘great end’ is made to rhyme with ‘friend’ in a foreshadowing of the intricate view of art and its fair attitudes in the final stanza of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Though Hunt never phrased his preference for ‘happy poetry’ as nobly as Keats’s lines do, his prose gloss might serve the larger purpose of defending his own poetic vision:

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They [the poets being criticised] might answer perhaps, generally, that they chuse to grapple with what is unavoidable, rather than pretend to be blind to it; but the more smiling Muse may reply, that half of the evils alluded to are produced by brooding over them; and that it is much better to strike at as many causes of the rest as possible, than to pretend to be satisfied with them in the midst of the most evident dissatisfaction. (E, 13 July 1817, pp. 443–4) In his case, Hunt’s ‘more smiling Muse’ wishes to suggest that life is better endured when enjoyed. There is, however, an awareness of shadow that gives a special lustre to his celebration of sunlight. Edgecombe suggests that Hunt’s turning of his prison cell into a bower (described in his Autobiography) might serve as ‘an emblem for the way his poetry often impearls itself about the grit of real suffering and nobility of purpose’.23 That there is grit at the centre of Hunt’s fanciful impearling is important to acknowledge. In ‘Politics and Poetics’ he writes: ‘Once more I turn to you,/Harsh politics! and once more bid adieu/To the soft dreaming of the Muse’s bowers’ (ll. 134–6). The mock-serious echo of ‘Lycidas’ (‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more/Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,/I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude’, ll. 1–3) helps to prevent the distinction from being banal.24 There is, however comically managed, an elegiac turn, a recognition of loss in the movement back to ‘Harsh politics’. The protest against politics joins hands with a counter-recognition that political writing is necessary to protect ‘the fainting Virtue of thy land’ (l. 130). Moreover, ‘the Muse’s bowers’ are consciously fanciful: a make-believe pastoral. Hunt may delight in rattling on exactly as he pleases, yet he is able to suggest through his manner a deliberate aversion of the eyes. Deliberate aversion: he always has it in him to put to serious purpose the ‘mixture of fancy and familiarity’ of which he speaks in a note to ‘Politics and Poetics’ (quoted in PWLH, p. 141), as the heartfelt, cunning attack on the horror of war in ‘Captain Sword and Captain Pen’ bears witness. This poem’s ‘mixture of fancy and familiarity’ works by understanding, yet getting beyond, the squeamishness attributed to the reader. In section 4, ‘On What Took Place on the Field of Battle the Night after the Victory’, Hunt takes a verb, ‘feel’, in which he often invests a large degree of trust, and shows it as capable of lamentably misleading. He depicts a soldier’s wife and mother who ‘have received/Happy letters, more believed/For public news, and feel the bliss/ The. heavenlier on a night like this’ (ll. 209–12). What can be tics elsewhere, such as the intensifying ‘heavenlier’, evoke the unreality of the ‘bliss’ the women ‘feel’. Reality is the grimness of death in battle: ‘By a ditch he lies/ Clutching the wet earth, his eyes/ Beginning to be mad’ (ll. 217–19). The reader is imagined as asserting “I’ll read no more” ’ (l. 241), before being told: ‘Thou must, thou must: /In thine own pang does wisdom trust’ (ll. 241– 2). The repetition of ‘thou must’ pities the ‘honest heart’ (l. 229) of the reader

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recoiling from horror, and sets up the homiletic line that follows, with its enfolding of ‘wisdom’ and empathising ‘pang’. Hunt’s poetry is about possibilities, and it made poetry possible for others. His example helped to catalyse Shelley’s trial in a conversational mode, Julian and Maddalo. Shelley’s poem is an affecting triumph of dialogic invention. When he sent the poem to Hunt, his accompanying letter blends compliment with qualification. ‘You will find’, he writes, ‘the little piece, I think, in some degree consistent with your own ideas of the manner in which Poetry ought to be written’. But after describing his attempted use of a ‘familiar style’, he goes on to say: ‘Not that the familiar style is to be admitted in the treatment of a subject wholly ideal, or in that part of any subject which relates to common life, where the passion exceeding a certain limit touches the boundaries of that which is ideal’. Possibly with the Maniac’s soliloquy in mind, Shelley asserts: ‘Strong passion expresses itself in metaphor borrowed from objects alike remote or near, and casts over all the shadow of its own greatness’, before he graciously doubles back on himself, suggesting that such ideas are borrowed from Hunt, ‘But what am I about. If my grandmother sucks eggs, was it I who taught her’ (SL, II: p. 108). Shelley implicitly questions any over-dogmatic commitment to the ‘familiar’ here; he is concerned lest we accept as the only reality ‘the Sun /Of this familiar life which seems to be/ But is not’ (‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 155–7). Yet, as passages from The Nymphs’ illustrate (a poem admired by Shelley as ‘truly poetical, in the intense and emphatic sense of the word’; SL, II: pp. 2–3), Hunt’s ‘familiar’ style will not be boxed in; its two-way dealings with the ‘ideal’ are among the most original features of his poetry. The appearance of the nymphguided ‘troop of clouds’ (II: l 38) in ‘The Nymphs’ is an instance: here Hunt makes a series of unexpected connections that underline his improvisatory quickness to escape critical nets. The clouds are likened to ‘pigeons that one sees/Round a glad homestead reeling at their ease,/But large and slowly’ (II: ll. 39–41). There, the final phrase qualifies the impression of frolicsome ‘reeling’ and prepares us for the climb through stylistic gears that issues in an account of how ‘those bodies fair/Obeyed a nobler impulse than the air,/A bright-eyed, visible thought’ (II: ll. 50–2). In this poem, Hunt interests us as much in the process as the product of poetic invention. He beguiles us into believing we are being offered a latter-day equivalent to the ways in which myths originally came into being. The subsequent description of the nymphs in the clouds (II: 54–118) uses comparisons to bring the unearthly down to earth (one nymph is depicted ‘Turning her from us like a suckling mother’, II: l. 72). Yet, conversely, Hunt’s rhythms buoy up his conversational idiom until it becomes an appropriate medium for ‘bright-eyed, visible thought’. In ‘What Is Poetry?’ Hunt writes that ‘Poetry is a passion, because it seeks the deepest impressions; and because it must undergo, in order to convey them’ (emphasis added).25 ‘It must undergo’ reveals what his own

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footnote makes clear: that he knows that the etymological root of ‘passion’ is a verb meaning ‘to suffer’. But he shies away from anything too strenuous or maverick in the presentation of ‘passion’. In a note, in effect, an extended essay, in The Feast of the Poets (1814), he offers a fascinating critique of Wordsworth’s practice in Lyrical Ballads as being at odds with his Preface’s ‘theory’. The theory, on Hunt’s account, ‘is only saying…that it is high time for poetry in general to return to nature and to a natural style, and that he will perform a great and useful work to society, who shall assist it to do so’ (Feast, p. 92). Hunt believes that Wordsworth has not ‘acted up to his theory’, ‘the popular effect of his poetry’ being to give us ‘puerility for simplicity, affectation for nature’. He ventriloquises Wordsworth as recommending ‘fresh thoughts and natural excitements’, but goes on to claim, in a comic reversal, that what the poet actually supplies is a procession of ‘Idiot Boys, Mad Mothers, Wandering Jews, Visitations of Ague, and Frenzied Mariners’ (a footnote indicates that Hunt knew the last was attributable to Coleridge) (Feast, p. 94). Hunt is troubled by Wordsworth’s predilection in his contributions to Lyrical Ballads for states of distress, idiocy and madness. Arguably, Wordsworth tests his reader by inviting them to see in such states ‘the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature’.26 He may, in ‘The Mad Mother’, be indebted to a ‘celebrated ballad’.27 But what converts pastiche into original poetry is Wordsworth’s ability to empathise with obsession. Coleridge’s account of the effect of lines 39–40—‘The breeze I see is in the tree;/It comes to cool my Babe and me’ (quoted from Mason)—indicates that the mother is gifted with something of the imaginative power of the poet: Wordsworth’s ex-collaborator finds the lines ‘expressive’ of the way in which the sufferer’s attention is abruptly drawn off by every trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by the one despotic thought, and bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing power of imagination and passion, the alien object to which it had been so abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate.28 Wordsworth is at once dealing with an extreme state and with those ‘elementary feelings’ and ‘calm and counteracting simplicities’ (Feast, p. 95) whose absence Hunt laments. Coleridge saw this when he claimed that the poem was exemplary of Wordsworth’s ‘meditative pathos’, further defined as ‘the sympathy…of a contemplator, rather than a fellow sufferer’, ‘a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature’.29 He suggests the motivation that lies behind Wordsworth’s ‘sympathy with man as man’:30 a conviction of the ‘sameness’ of our ‘nature’ that, paradoxically, impels the poet to stress the singleness, even the singularity, of the figures he presents.

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Hunt’s misunderstanding of Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads was partly corrected in 1815 when he added the line (spoken by all present), ‘This, this is the Prince of the Bards of his Time!’ (l. 363). But as Clarence DeWitt Thorpe comments, ‘Hunt’s criticism of Wordsworth is a mingled skein’.31 Much has to do with the fact that Hunt deals with spontaneity differently from the way Wordsworth does. For Wordsworth, ‘all good Poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, and yet will never be created by a poet who has not ‘also thought long and deeply’.32 Feelings and thought bear on one another in his great poems, until a meditative poetry is produced, one of whose triumphs is to preserve the traces of the ‘spontaneous’. For Hunt, such a poetry can seem strained, and his own efforts are devoted to releasing a flow (not overflow) of natural (rather than powerful) feelings. His use of pronouns is important in this context. In ‘Fancy’s Party. A Fragment’ the scene of inspiration is both impromptu and collective: ‘’Tis fancies now must charm us;/Nor is the bliss ideal,/For all we feel, /In woe or weal,/Is, while we feel it, real’ (ll. 8–12). The spry rhythms encourage the reader’s trust in ‘all we feel’, even as they imply the provisionality of a truth that lasts ‘while we feel it’. The poem celebrates that charmed, transient ‘while’: made more than merely artificial by the energy of the writing. Hunt’s verse lays bare its moment-by-moment pulsations, as when the anticipation of ‘pictures’ (l. 28) gives way to a desired change: ‘And hey, what’s this? the walls, look,/Are wrinkling as a skin does;/And now they are bent/To a silken tent’ (ll. 29–32). Few writers before Browning—in, say, ‘Two in the Campagna’—can bring the formal and the idiomatic together as fluently as Hunt does in these lines: ‘And hey, what’s this?’ startles us into paying attention to the metamorphosis about to be described, the walls cinematically ‘wrinkling as a skin does’. The fractional impression of something disagreeable locates us into the split-second of change and saves the ‘silken tent’ from seeming to be merely a poeticism. In Wordsworth, our imaginations are instructed to see into the life of things; in Hunt, we are persuaded that poems have an impromptu life analogous to the life of the mind that creates them. In an essay ‘I and We’ Hunt is performatively alert to the difficulties of using either pronoun when writing: ‘I am very much hampered’, he starts, ‘with this 7 of mine. If I value myself upon anything, it is upon being social; which is a thing essentially me.’33 ‘I imagines itself as ‘We’ in a way that confirms its existence as ‘I’: not because each in a prison imagining a key confirms a prison, but because collectivity without individuality is a fiction. That Hunt’s poetry advocates the virtue of ‘sociality’ is evident from a sonnet such as ‘Quiet Evenings’. In it subjectivity never threatens to be socially disruptive, as it does in virtually all the canonical Romantics. The poet projects on to his addressee (Thomas Barnes) the feeling he enjoys, but, in so doing, he pays a compliment in lines whose sounds have a calming, open-vowelled musicality: ‘You know the rural feeling, and the charm/That stillness has for a world-fretted ear’ (ll 3–4). Barnes,

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‘strengthened’ by ‘The throng of life’ (l.2), is said to ‘know the rural feeling’ (3), showing his capacity for sympathy. ‘Charm’ may risk trivialising the ‘feeling’, but in its hint of temporary enchantment against being ‘worldfretted’ it can be defended as deliberately not overstressing the pleasures of solitude. The poetry’s art lies in a set of accommodating contracts: between the formal demands of the sonnet and the inflections of the friendly speaking voice; and between the taking for granted that the feeling spoken about is familiar and the impulse to capture its uniqueness. But these accommodations do not derive from appeal to common assumptions; rather, as, the invocation of ‘native taste’ in the first line indicates, they rest on a trust in the innate ability of individuals to sympathise with one another’s feelings. Interplay replaces conflict or dependency. At the close the poem tempers its preference for the ‘charm’ (l. 9) of rural silence: ‘Wants there no other sound then?—Yes, one more.—/ The voice of friendly visiting, long owed’ (ll. 13–14). The poem privileges and embodies an act of ‘friendly visiting’ in that colloquially turned ‘Yes, one more’; its general tact and trust in its addressee allow the poet the playful reproach implied by ‘long owed’. Both Coleridge and Hunt engage with a new poetics of spontaneity, but their practices vary. Even when in ‘Frost at Midnight’ Coleridge traces everwidening circles of connection, the reader never forgets the lonely self ‘every where/Echo or mirror seeking of itself’ (ll. 21–2, quoted from STC:OA, p. 87). Coleridge’s ‘idling Spirit’ (l. 20) is hungry for relationship; his poem uncovers the process of association by which it seeks to trace a circle leading from self, through memory, to futurity, and ultimately to God. That uncovering makes us conscious that the discovery of relationship is founded on want; we admire the art with which the jumps and links of thought are mimed, yet we detect, too, an only too human arbitrariness. The conversation poem, in Coleridge’s hands, becomes an experiment into and proof of the possibility of the imaginatively unified. For Hunt, the shaping imagination is just as bound up with the aesthetic outcome, but his idea of satisfying overall shape differs sharply from Coleridge’s. Hunt’s poetry is ready to let connections and suggestions emerge from the profusion of particulars. So, in ‘Description of Hampstead’, the decision to halve the poem into two sections of seven lines each is used to subdue the conflictual energies typically found in the sonnet form; instead, the poem is free to celebrate ‘A village, revelling in varieties’ (l. 8). Hunt’s reputation as a celebrant of ‘varieties’ has suffered, in part, because he was both outstripped and criticised by Keats. Undeniably Hunt’s influence was not wholly helpful for Keats. ‘Sleep and Poetry’, we learn, was composed ‘in the library of Hunt’s cottage, where an extempore bed had been made up for Keats on the sofa’. 34 That ‘extempore bed’ offers itself as a tempting symbol of Keats’s early versification, and, for all the incidental triumphs of ‘Sleep and Poetry’, it is only when Keats commits himself to a poetry whose every rift is loaded

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with ore that he solemnises the marriage between rich deliberateness and fine surprise characteristic of his greatest work. But Keats’s desire to escape the influence of Hunt should not lead us to suppose that Hunt’s poetry lacks significant merit. Walter Jackson Bate points out that Keats’s ‘later need to disengage himself from a strong identification and the remarks he makes in the process are far from an objective guide in any approach that we ourselves—with no such excuse—make to Hunt’.35 What Keats lacks in his employment of Hunt’s manner is the latter’s selfawareness. Hunt is aware that he is not aiming for sublime heights; Keats is not. Greatly aspiring from the start, Keats offers, in his early work, the spectacle of a tyro who hopes Huntian pastiche will storm Parnassus, even as he vulnerably expresses his fear that ‘I presumptuously/Have spoken’ (‘Sleep and Poetry’, ll. 270–1). Hunt’s is an ‘ease that always’, in Richard Cronin’s perceptive view, ‘implies the perplexities of his reader’.36 Keats’s early ’imaginings‘ imply his own perplexities; they swerve between a longing to ‘die a death/Of luxury’ and a wish to advance into as yet undiscovered ‘Vistas of solemn beauty’ (‘Sleep and Poetry’, ll. 71, 58–9, 73). Hunt induces perplexities in order to prompt the reader’s re-evaluation of assumptions about what is natural and appropriate; Keats rouses the reader’s protective instincts by virtue of his transparent ambition and imaginative desire. It is fascinating that Keats grew to dislike in Hunt the older man’s habit of second-guessing his listener’s response. Hatred of a poetry that has a palpable design on us is a Keatsian axiom associated with his revolt against Wordsworthian sublimity. Yet it applies as much to his feelings about Hunt, a man who ‘understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself possesses— he begins an explanation in such a curious manner that our taste and selflove is offended continually’ (LJK, II: p. ll). But Hunt’s curious explanations in his writing stem from his improvisatory aesthetic. The valuations he makes are inseparable from the performances in which he makes them. Like Shelley in A Defence of Poetry, he sees the danger of inserting ‘his own conceptions of right and wrong’ in his poetry (SPP, p. 488). So, he writes in his Preface to the 1832 edition of his poems that poetry which contains a moral ‘least obviously, contains it most; because nature with her boundless instinct is speaking to us, and not the individual with his narrow experience’ (PWLH, p. xxv). How to get from ‘the individual with his narrow experience’ to ‘nature’ is a problem that preoccupies him. Although there is about his concern the self-conscious nostalgia of the sentimental poet for the naive, one solution he finds is that of adapting genre, embodying the discoveries of previous ages, to his own individual voice. In The Feast of the Poets satire is transformed by what Hunt calls his ‘animal spirits’ (PWLH, p. xxvii) into something like exhibitionism on behalf of the natural, especially in the 1814 edition where he combines the roles of poet and critic.37 In the poem Hunt turns his attack on poets into

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self-delighting play. 38 His dislike of Pope’s ‘monotonous and cloying versification’ (Feast, p. 27) at once impels and is lost in the juggling act of his poem’s anapaestic couplets. Attempting to describe Apollo arriving to pass judgement, he writes: He chang’d his appearance—to—what shall I say? To a gallant young soldier returning in May? No—that’s a resemblance too vapid and low:— Let’s see—to a finished young traveller?—No: (quoted from Feast, p. 3) With dexterity Hunt anticipates the undercutting of poetic effects in Don Juan. But when Byron finds ‘this last simile’ to be ‘trite and stupid’ (I: lv, 440; BPW, V: p. 27) at the close of a stanza, he asserts the role of the poet as creator and destroyer. However implicitly or ironically, Don Juan hovers at such moments over an emptiness that lies just under all we do. Hunt, by contrast, skims his breezy path from ‘a resemblance too vapid and low’ to confession of the fact that ‘nobody’s likeness will help me’ (Feast, p. 3) with the imperturbable good spirits that establish his right to act as an arbiter of taste. Indeed, throughout the poem, he assumes his potentially tricky narratorial role with engaging verve, giving a deliberately loose coherence to the whole.39 Close to the start Apollo is shown thinking it time to ‘ring in’ the poets of England: ‘“I think,” said the God, recollecting, (and then/He fell twiddling a sunbeam as I may my pen)’ (Feast, p. 1). The comparison not only cuts the ‘God’ down to size (twiddling a sunbeam the celestial equivalent to twiddling a pen), but it also gives a sense of the poet in the throes of thinking about what to write. He is comically stuck for words, yet able to rhyme on a conjunction in the nick of time. Elsewhere, he announces matter for another song: ‘fancies like these, though I’ve stores to supply me,/I’d better keep back for a poem I’ve by me’ (Feast, p. 2). This makes the point, with winning impudence, that there are new subjects for poetry. One is meant to assume that those ‘stores’ of ‘fancies’ will be at the service of the poetry implicidy recommended throughout The Feast of the Poets: a poetry that catches pleasures on the wing in a spirit of generous feeling. Hunt recommends a non-egotistical ‘going out of own nature’ (SPP, p. 487), in Shelley’s phrase, in a way that flirts with egotism; but before we second Keats’s criticism, more or less to that effect, it is only fair to note how wittily Hunt brings the issue into the open as the feast gets under way: It can’t be suppos’d I should think of repeating The fancies that flow’d at this laureat meeting; I haven’t the brains, and besides, was not there… (Feast, p. 18)

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The modesty is mock-modest: Hunt cleverly rules himself out of competition with other poets and has the ‘brains’ to imply that the ‘laureat meeting’ which he did not attend is entirely his own creation. Leigh Hunt as the improvisatore of Hampstead might seem an unintentionally comic figure. Yet improvisation fascinated him, as emerges in his account in his Autobiography of Theodore Hook, ‘amusing us very much with his talent at extempore verse’. Hunt was impressed that Hook could extemporise in rhyme: ‘he ran his jokes and his verses upon us all in the easiest manner, saying something characteristic of everybody, or avoiding it with a pun’.40 Hook comes close here to embodying one of Hunt’s ideals of poetic skill, a tightrope walking that draws attention to the poet as performer and licenses the poet’s right to an intimate yet critical relationship with his audience. Richard Cronin argues that Hunt’s supposed lapses of taste in the choice of diction in The Story of Rimini derive from an impulse to challenge cultural authority: ‘His is always a knowing innocence, an “affectation of bright-eyed ease”’.41 In the poem Hunt thrives on clashes of register, superimpositions of place and tonality; an urban sprightliness (particularly marked when the ‘rural’ is being praised) unabashedly stands in for Dante’s tragic pathos. Central to its originality is the sense it gives of being alive to ‘the demand of the moment’ and to the opportunities such demands afford. Shelley depicts the Italian improvisatore Sgricci as ‘continually expressing the various movements of soul of the characters’ and able to communicate ‘to the soul of the spectator the passions that he was representing and by which his soul was by turns penetrated’. 42 The depiction applies to a major aspect of Hunt’s achievement in The Story of Rimini. John O.Hayden praises the poem’s ‘characterization (or…“psychological insights”…)’, and the analysis of Giovanni in canto III, lines 67 to 98, is a case in point.43 Hunt has just shifted gears, changing from cheerful gossip about the knightliness of his princes to an end-stopped line which implies that what has gone before has prepared the way for the poet’s true interest: The tale I tell is of the human heart’ (III: l. 66). The announcement brings Hunt into Wordsworthian territory, yet the shrewd analysis of Giovanni challenges comparison with Byron’s set-piece delineations of character in his Eastern Tales. Hunt’s portrait alludes to and quietly mocks Byron’s enigmatic self-presentation in the Tales. Yet, in the larger context of Hunt’s writings, even his irony is quick to ironise itself. Whatever irony at Byron’s expense is at work in the fact that the younger poet wrote on the manuscript, ‘The whole passage is very fine and original’ (PWLH, p. 672), is itself cancelled, even as it is displayed, in Hunt’s account of Byron himself saying that his recently separated wife ‘“liked my poem, and had compared his temper to that of Giovanni”’.44 Whereas Byron’s account of Lara refuses to quell enigma—‘In him inexplicably mix’d appeared/Much to be loved and hated, sought and feared’ (Lara, I: xvii, ll. 289–90; quoted from BPW, III: p. 224)—the criticism of Giovanni’s

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‘ill-tempered pride’ (III: l. 68) is unafraid to ground itself on an ethical foundation, one familiar in Hunt’s work: Bold, handsome, able if he chose to please, Punctual and right in common offices, He lost the sight of conduct’s only worth, The scattering smiles on this uneasy earth… (III: ll. 69–72) ‘Only’ in ‘conduct’s only worth’ is riskily absolute, yet it is an absolute provoked by the relativist tolerance felt to be appropriate to ‘this uneasy earth’. Hunt’s ethic of dispensing ‘smiles’ contrasts with Byron’s guarded endorsement of Lara’s motives for occasionally helping others: Too high for common selfishness, he could At times resign his own for others’ good, But not in pity, not because he ought, But in some strange perversity of thought, That swayed him onward with a secret pride To do what few or none would do beside… (I: xviii, ll. 337–42) Byron analyses a character whose ‘secret pride’ takes the form of believing that he is impelled by ‘fate’ (I: xviii, l. 336), yet the poet’s sympathy shows. The couplets discipline tortuous psychic processes. They imply the poet’s marshalling intelligence and the hero’s quasi-existentialist need to invent a code by which to live. Byron’s portrait represents far more than a glamorising of secret sorrows or the will to evil of Lara’s prototype, Bertram in Scott’s Rokeby (see the editor’s note in BPW, III: p. 453). Hunt, too, suggests that moral judgement can never be a question of the inflexible application of a priori principles. The pride evinced by Giovanni is at odds with the compassionate regard for others that is at the heart of Hunt’s vision and artistry in The Story of Rimini. Yet Giovanni is not without glimmers of vulnerability, as is conceded in lines where Hunt’s subtlety half-threatens to outrun complete clarity: And so much knowledge of one’s self there lies Cored, after all, in our complacencies, That no suspicion would have touched him more, Than that of wanting on the generous score… (III: ll. 83–6) The paragraph goes on to be damning about Giovanni, but one serious implication of these jauntily perceptive lines is that, in Francesca’s husband, as in the rest of us, the feeling self is made up of self-awareness

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and ‘complacencies’. Hunt is less a poet of ‘complacencies’ than a poet sharply critical of those who are morally rigorous without removing the beam of complacency from their own eyes. After Paolo’s death in the duel, Giovanni is portrayed as remorseful: ‘noble passion touched Giovanni’s soul’ (IV: l. 303). The ‘free and idiomatic cast of language’ which Hunt promises in his Preface (Rimini, p. xv) not only serves to attack aristocratic rigidities—such as Duke Guido’s habit of control—but also acts as an implicit rejection of ‘the habit of falsehood which pervaded society’ (quoted in PWLH, p. xxiv). Ultimately the poem rejects the idea that any person or temperament needs to be wholly fixed; its style reflects Hunt’s account of its ‘moral’ as ‘tolerant and reconciling’, and as suggesting ‘the danger of confounding forms with justice, of setting authorised selfishness above the most natural impulses’.45 The very essence of Hunt’s style is to separate mere ‘forms’ from ‘just’ appreciation, and amounts to rejection of the single point of view. Couplets escape the handcuffs of endstopped rhyme by gliding into enjambed pauses; syntax and perspective waver, focus and drift; diction juxtaposes the formal and informal to continually surprising effect. Decorum is hinted at, then laid aside in favour of a fresher, less dignified but more open response to experience: Francesca’s grieving death is presented from the view of spectators, who ‘saw her tremble sharply, feet and all’ (IV: l. 408), where the final phrase has an eyes-on-stalks slanginess; like an author impatient to get on with something else, Hunt wants to ‘finish all; /And so at once I reach the funeral’ (IV: ll. 422–3); the poem shies away at the end from the tragic in an almost flippant gesture: ‘But no more of sorrow’ (IV: ll. 515). Autumnal leaves are described in the penultimate paragraph to create an elegiac effect—or so it seems, until the narrator’s eye is caught by the ‘dark varieties’ of the leaf-stripped trunks (IV: l. 487). The Story of Rimini refuses closure of moral judgement or of aesthetic shape. The opening of canto IV, Hunt’s meditation on why he ‘Should thus pursue a mournful theme’ (l. 3), produces an apologia marked by shoulder-shrugging hopefulness: ‘the poet’s task divine/Of making tears themselves look up and shine’ (ll. 13–14) is less a persuasive programme than a brief snatch at such a thing by way of a Marvell-like image.46 What is heartening, even enthralling, about Hunt’s improvisatory creations is the sense of a pervading authorial presence, ‘all life and animation’ in Hazlitt’s words for Hunt in conversation.47 ‘Perfected bygone moments, perfected moments in the glimmering futurity, these are the treasured gem-like lyrics of Shelley and Keats’: D.H. Lawrence’s view may be over-influenced by Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, but his characterisation of one kind of Romantic poetry as investing in the ‘perfected’ reminds us both of Hunt’s championing of Shelley and Keats, and of his own anticipation of Lawrence’s other kind of poetry, ‘the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present’. Hunt’s poetry brings experience alive and opens itself to the ‘immediate present’, doing so in

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ways that enable poetry for others. ‘In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished’.48 Hunt is a poet of ‘scattery light’, of the ‘loosening silver’ of a fountain as at its upmost height it topples over, its droplets catching the sun.49 Especially in his poetry his political radicalism shows itself not so much through stated opinions as through an attraction towards what is alive, momentary, creatively budding, vivid, imperfect, refusing subordination in some hierarchical scheme. He turns genres inside out, making the ‘immediate present’ of composition a poetic event teeming with multifarious choices and chances: ‘I’ll write a Choice, said I: and it shall be/Something ’twixt labour and extempore’ (ll. 32–3), Hunt writes in ‘The “Choice”’. The italics and craftily placed colon, where one might expect a lighter point, give the illusion that he is surprising himself; certainly, he takes us with him in the process of choosing a theme. It is surely time to recognise the distinction with which Leigh Hunt’s writings occupy the space between ‘labour and extempore’.

Notes 1 Quoted from Peter Otto’s entry on ‘originality’ in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Period: British Culture 1776–1832, gen. ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 629. 2 John Home Tooke, The Diversions of Purley, ed. Richard Taylor (London: William Tegg, 1857), p. 636. For ‘Spontaneous’ as a ‘foreign’ adjective associated with ‘Will’, see the list on p. 638. 3 William Hazlitt, ‘The Late Mr. Home Tooke’, in The Spirit of the Age (1825), Howe, XI: p. 56. Hazlitt points out the strangeness of Tooke’s attempt to disprove, from the nature of language, the existence of ‘abstract ideas’, given that Tooke viewed the relation between language and ideas as arbitrary. 4 Tom Paulin comments on ‘Tooke’s urgent sense of the thingness of words, their ontological presence and uniqueness’; see The Day-star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (London: Faber, 1998), p. 250. 5 For a contemporary discussion—and exemplification—of ‘consciousness in process, like an American poem’ see Tom Paulin, Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays, 1980–1996 (London: Faber, 1996); the quoted phrase is on p. xi. Also of relevance to my essay’s concerns is Rodney Stenning Edgecombe’s thesis that ‘the characteristic strivings’ of Hunt’s poetry include ‘effortlessness, the sense of free improvisation currente calamo’ (see Edgecombe, p. 45). 6 My use of ‘spontaneity’ is coloured by the sense, ‘fact or quality of coming without deep thought or meditation’ (a meaning the OED traces to 1826), but it primarily bears in mind the implications for poetic practice of the meanings which Paul Magnuson highlights in his discussion of Wordsworth’s use of the word: that is, ‘“voluntary,” “without constraint,” and “of one’s own accord or free will”’, meanings which ‘first appeared in philosophical and biological contexts and emphasised the contrast between the free and voluntary as opposed to the externally constrained’; see ‘Wordsworth and Spontaneity’, in The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, ed. Donald H.Reiman et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1978), pp. 102, 103.

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7 Edgecombe defends the apparent ‘laziness’ of the line ‘Seemed answering another distant one’ as ‘expressive’ of ‘a real human waking’; see Edgecombe, p. 108. 8 Autobiography, II: p. 207. 9 See Cox, pp. 159–61 for the poem as ‘a Catullan epyllion, celebrating love and sensuality over against the demands of duty, nation, and traditional family values’ (pp. 160–1). 10 See Imagination and Fancy (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1891), pp. 51, 50, 51; Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 24, hereafter Perry. Perry describes ‘and yet’ as ‘a hallmark grammar that articulates Coleridge’s divided vision’. 11 For Hunt’s use of ‘occupatio’ or ‘pretending to omit that which you intend to include’ in The Story of Rimini, see Edgecombe, p. 62. 12 For the influence of Hunt’s ‘To Thomas Moore’, l. 35 on ‘To My Brother George’ (epistle), see The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), p. 53. 13 Quoted from Theodore Redpath, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 1807– 1824 (London: Harrap, 1973), p. 463. 14 Quoted from The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore: Reprinted from the Early Editions, with Explanatory Notes, Etc. (London: Frederick Warne, n.d.), p. 462. 15 Writing to the Moment, p. xiii. 16 Quoted from Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, ed. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), pp. 280, 276; hereafter LHLC. Compare the contrast between Hazlitt and Hunt made by David Bromwich in his Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (1983; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999): ‘Lighter in his graces and better equipped than Hazlitt to sound the by-ways of common emotions, Hunt is also less bold’, p. 113. See also Perry, p. 36, for a contrast (in Hunt’s favour) between Hazlitt’s and Hunt’s views of Coleridge. 17 Autobiography, II: p. 170. 18 Autobiography, II: p. 171. 19 Autobiography, I: pp. 199–200. 20 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), ed. Norman Page, intro. J.Hillis Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 120, 121. 21 ‘Addenda’ to ‘Letter to John Murray Esqre.’, in Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 159. 22 See The Poems of John Keats, ed. E.De Selincourt (London: Methuen, 1905), for the view that ‘Keats is thinking here chiefly of Byron’, p. 409. 23 Edgecombe, p. 34. 24 Milton is quoted from the Oxford Authors edition (1991), ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. 25 Imagination and Fancy, p. 2. 26 ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)’, quoted from Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason (London: Longman, 1992), p. 63; hereafter Mason. 27 Mason, p. 173. 28 Biographia Literaria, ch. 22; quoted from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H.J. Jackson, Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 409; hereafter STC:OA. 29 STC:OA, pp. 408–9. 30 STC:OA, p. 408. 31 LHLC, p. 39. 32 ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)’, in Mason, p. 62. 33 LHLC, p. 208.

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34 See The Poems of John Keats, ed. E.De Selincourt, p. 403. 35 John Keats (1963; London: Hogarth Press, 1992), p. 92. 36 The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 185; hereafter Cronin. 37 For ‘Hunt’s Dialogic Method’ in Feast, see Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 179–96; the quoted phrase is a section heading on p. 179. 38 See Edgecombe, p. 154, for a helpful discussion of the poem’s link to ‘Lucianic satire’. 39 Edgecombe, p. 156, is right to argue that ‘[i]n almost all his poetry, Hunt shows himself a poet of impulse’, but on shakier ground when he asserts that this necessarily leads to a rococo indifference to ‘the larger shape’. Rather, ‘the larger shape’ of Hunt’s poems is intimately connected to their fascination with detail. 40 Autobiography, II: pp. 22–3. 41 Cronin, p. 185. 42 P.M.S.Dawson, ‘Shelley and the Improvisatore Sgricci’, K-SMB, XXXII (1981), p. 27. 43 ‘Leigh Hunt’s The Story of Rimini: Reloading the Romantic Canon’, Durham University Journal, LXXIX (1987), p. 280. 44 Autobiography, II: p. 176. 45 ‘Preface to Foliage, in LHLC, p. 132. 46 Edgecombe, pp. 149–50, points out that Hunt ‘pioneered the reinstatement of Marvell’s “strong and grave talent for poetry”’; he is quoting from Hunt’s essay ‘On the Latin Poems of Milton’. 47 ‘Mr. T.Moore-Mr. Leigh Hunt’, in The Spirit of the Age, Howe, XI: p. 177. 48 D.H.Lawrence, ‘Poetry and the Present’, in D.H.Lawrence, The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (1964; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 182. 49 Images drawn from The Story of Rimini, I: ll. 22, 84.

9

Leigh Hunt and the poetics and politics of the Fancy Jeffrey C.Robinson

The poetics of the Fancy challenge the dominant poetics of the British Romantic period—the poetics of the ‘Imagination’, and a poetry of ‘depth’, of synthesis, of the lyric speaking subject, of elegiac and inward-turning feelings, and of closed forms. A Romantic ‘counterpoetics’ of the Fancy is, by contrast, ‘superficial’, centrifugal, focusing on the world, ‘cheerful’ but thought-full, outward turning and open-form. From 1811 onwards Leigh Hunt championed the poetics of the Fancy as part of his critique of Wordsworth, expressing this through his temperament, social relations, poetic theory and practice. In this chapter I explore the development of Hunt’s counterpoetics of the Fancy through a close reading of his collections The Feast of the Poets (1811, 1814, 1815) and Foliage (1818). What emerges is an impressive and coherent articulation of an alternative Romantic poetry, which bears directly upon some recent changes to the Romantic canon.

John Keats’s perplexity

Here is John Keats describing Leigh Hunt, December 1818: The night we went to Novello’s there was a complete set to of Mozart and punning—I was so completely tired of it that if I were to follow my own inclinations I should never meet any one of that set again, not even Hunt—who is certainly a pleasant fellow in the main when you are with him—but in reallity he is vain, egotistical and disgusting in matters of taste and in morals—He understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself possesses—he begins an explanation in such a curious manner that our taste and self-love is offended continually. Hunt does one harm by making fine things petty and beautiful things hateful—Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white Busts—and many a glorious thing when associated with him becames a nothing—This distorts one’s mind—make[s] one’s thoughts bizarre—perplexes one in the standard of Beauty— (LJK, II: p. 11)

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Although traditionally read as a welcome sign of Keats’s maturation, his letting go of the seductive poet of lush imagery, lax lines and loose politics, the passage, I believe, offers a contrary, more complex, meaning, one that proposes the onset of Keats’s more serious if ambivalent commitment to Hunt’s poetics of the Fancy. Keats, it must be recalled, never fully pulled away from Hunt, referring to him often in later letters and, of course, accepting a generous invitation to stay with Hunt and his wife in the weeks before the fatal journey to Italy. It is easy to dwell in this passage on Hunt’s punning and his attitude to Mozart as indicators of Hunt’s egotism and trivialisation of great art—one who appropriates and diminishes beautiful objects. There is an aesthetic at stake here: Keats wants great art to produce in him enchantment, wonderment, and, as he says, ‘speculation’. Hunt snatches the depth out of the beautiful and drags the pure serene of desire through the mud of self-conscious and sceptical thought. Keats, says tradition, is learning to rise above all this; tempered by the tragic experiences of his life, he is about to enter the mature phase of the great odes. The most moving part of this passage comes at the end, when Keats complains that Hunt has ‘distorted’ his mind, made his thoughts ‘bizarre’ and ‘perplexed’ his ideas of beauty. This is not the language of rejection but of a confusion about aesthetics. Fanny Brawne, introduced two pages after the discussion of his response to Hunt, seems made to order for one ‘perplexed in the standard of Beauty’: with a fine style of countenance of the lengthen’d sort—she wants sentiment in every feature—she manages to make her hair look well—her nostrills are fine—though a little painful—he[r] mouth is bad and good— he[r] Profil is better than her full-face which indeed is not full put pale and thin without showing any bone…[She is] monstrous in her behaviour flying out in all directions…from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. (LJK, II: p. 13) She is a figure at once from nature and from artifice, fashionable and interested in fashion, not ‘composed’ (in the Wordsworthian sense) and contained or restrained, but dispersed, not full and realised but suggestive, evanescent. At least as much as he gravitates towards the ‘depths’, Keats is drawn—in the way of the Fancy—to the surface, to the poetics of impermeability (Charles Bernstein’s term1). If Hunt makes glorious things become a nothing, that too may be good for Keatsian poetry. Part of Keats’s perplexity that evening may have resulted from the party itself. Was Hunt more serious with Keats, more sympathetic with the young poet, when they were alone? Perhaps Keats felt betrayed by Hunt’s banter among others at this heady, wine-guided evening which was, quite probably, tinged with homoerotic frisson. In a poem written the same year, ‘Fancy’s Party’, Hunt takes the reader on a fanciful journey through the night sky, in a

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manner that one caustic reviewer from Blackwood’s Magazine dubbed a ‘debauch’ between Hunt and Hazlitt. Keats seemed to have felt sullied by the evening, sitting absorbed yet possibly overwhelmed by these lively and inventive, if sacrilegious, presences. In what I have just described, poetry and poetics may seem secondary to the drama of personalities and egos, cultures and communities. But, in turning away from Keats to Hunt, I focus on the Fancy as a poetics, albeit one made manifest in the lives and careers of persons. Akin to the PreRaphaelite movement, the group gathered around Hunt lived the principles it attributed to poetry.2 Keats, observer and participant, neophyte and genius, was passionate in his response to Hunt and his circle because of poetry, and that passion also drives his perplexity at Hunt’s upgrading of the Fancy in poetic and in cultural terms.

Sensualities

While reviewing Keats’s 1820 volume for the Indicator, Hunt observed: Mr. Keats’s versification sometimes reminds us of Milton in his blank verse, and sometimes of Chapman both in his blank verse and rhyme; but his faculties, essentially speaking, though partaking of the unearthly aspirations and abstract yearnings of both these poets, are altogether his own. They are ambitious, but less directly so. They are more social, and in the finer sense of the word, sensual, than either. They are more coloured by the modern philosophy of sympathy and natural justice…. The character of his genius is that of energy and voluptuousness, each able at will to take leave of the other, and possessing, in their union, a high feeling of humanity not common to the best authors who can less combine them. (Indicator, 9 August 1820, p. 352) Keats’s scope includes more than the social domain; he deserves to belong with poets of epic achievement. On the other hand, his poetry derives character from the social sphere of ‘sympathy and natural justice’, from the sensual and the erotic. Hunt shows no interest in or awareness of the elegiac as a significant preoccupation in Keats’s work. Instead, the discovery of ‘energy’ in Keats anticipates its importance in the American counterpoetics William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. These are poets who also support the sensual in ‘versification’ as a sign that mind and poetry derive energy from the body to enter most fully and sympathetically into the lives of others. Behind this reading of Keats is the belief that poetry reaches humanity less through the tragic vision and more through the play of ‘voluptuous’ sensualities. Sensuality dwells in sounds, rhythms, and signifiers; as Hunt said of the heroic couplets in Lamia,

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‘the lines seem to take pleasure in the progress of their own beauty, like seanymphs luxuriating through the water’.3 There was more to Hunt’s influence on Keats, however, than the ‘slippery blisses’ of Endymion, II: 758. Cockney traits, akin to the poetics of the Fancy, pervade Keats’s poetry and have usually been associated with ‘immaturity’ in the narrative of his rise to poetic maturity in the Odes. In Hyperion, for example, the death-infused grandeur of the opening two books has been celebrated more than the fragmentary effort to introduce the new god of poetry, Apollo, in the third. Keats had trouble with his new deity, and part of this may have turned upon whether or not his triumphant god should resemble an imposing patriarchal figure or his more disreputable Bacchic counterpart. Consider the lines that introduce Apollo: Meantime touch piously the Delphic harp, And not a wind of heaven but will breathe In aid soft warble from the Dorian flute; For lo! ’tis for the Father of all verse. Flush every thing that hath a vermeil hue, Let the rose glow intense and warm the air, And let the clouds of even and of morn Float in voluptuous fleeces o’er the hills; Let the red wine within the goblet boil, Cold as a bubbling well; let faint-lipp’d shells, On sands, or in great deeps, vermilion turn Through all their labyrinths; and let the maid Blush keenly, as with some warm kiss surpris’d. (III: 10–22) In the discussion of Foliage to follow I will comment on the importance of ‘breathing’ as a Utopian speech for Hunt appropriate to soft warbling, the intense blushing of the rose, a world of clouds floating, wine bubbling, kisses and the blushes of the maid. Either this passage represents a failure of Keats’s knowledge of myth or it explores an unusual view of the poet-god. At the moment of Apollo’s apotheosis, a few lines from the end of the fragment, Keats originally wrote that ‘wild commotions…made [Apollo] flush’ Into a hue more roseate than sweet-pain Gives to a ravish’d Nymph when her warm tears Gush luscious with no sob. —but then cancelled the lines. 4 Within the Apollonian god of the Imagination lurks the orgiastic, sensual, disorganised, but oddly democratic, promoter of the Fancy: ‘Let the red wine within the goblet boil’. Keats seems uncertainly poised between these two poetics, Apollonian and Bacchic, hungering for both.

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Feasting poets

Hunt’s Feast of the Poets (1815) features a Bacchic Apollo and—like Foliage—it offers a compelling, even irreverent community for poets. The poem is organised in three parts: firstly, the narrative of the feast, presided over by Apollo, to establish the best poets of Britain past and present; secondly, an extensive set of annotations to the poem, the longest of which is a powerful essay on Wordsworth’s poetics; and, thirdly, a set of translations from Catullus, Horace and Homer. The annotations make up the greater part of the book, with critical and intepretive analysis of poetry and versification that serves as a balance to the deliberate whimsicality of The Feast. This is evidently a less weighty publication compared with the two-volume Poems by William Wordsworth, also published in 1815. But if Wordsworth’s likening of his oeuvre to a gothic church was an accurate representation of his intentions for his poems, Hunt’s book, by contrast, deliberately promotes the antimonumental. Wordsworth in 1815 was most recently known for The Excursion (1814), a blank-verse narrative of truly monumental proportions, whereas Hunt’s Feast celebrated a fleeting event in tripping anapaestic couplets. While Wordsworth’s Excursion and Poems set out a vision of benign patriarchal authority and a kind of chaste domesticity, Hunt’s Apollonian master of ceremonies is extravagantly hedonistic. Apollo in The Feast relishes food ‘racy and rare’, enjoys nectareous wines, and presides over a ‘laureate meeting’ at which the ‘fancies…flow’d’ (Feast (1815), pp. 22–3). Nothing could less resemble life at Rydal Mount. Unlike the British establishment that crowned Robert Southey Poet Laureate, Hunt’s Apollo insists upon a wreath for each poet in attendance—‘none were omitted’ (Feast (1815), p. 22). In the 1814 edition of The Feast Wordsworth had left the party under a cloud, exiting early because his ‘melancholy’ inclined him to ‘turn away from society’ (Feast, p. 90). Hunt’s Apollo, by contrast, recommends sociability: ‘Let us make us a heav’n of our own upon earth, And wake with the lips, that we dip in our bowls, That divinest of music,—congenial souls.’ (Feast, p. 16) Congeniality is a principle of Hunt’s poetics, as is inclusiveness ‘from old father Chaucer to Collins and Gray’ (Feast, p. 19; the women poets were dining elsewhere on this evening). It is precisely the range of ‘poetries’ in mutual relation that bespeaks the health of the tradition and of the current state of the art. In the 1815 poem, all of Apollo’s guests leave the party ‘highly delighted’ (Feast (1815), p. 25); good poetry doesn’t require melancholy or ‘over-contemplative’ isolation (Feast (1815), p. 107). So The Feast of the Poets shows us the development of Hunt’s distinctive poetic: inclusive, congenial, idiomatic. That poetry is metaphorically wine,

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eros and breath indicates that its intensity belongs to the body as well as the mind. The anapaestic tetrameter couplets are, oddly, linked to one principle of open-form poetics: if blank verse, for example, calls attention to conflict between line length and the length of a clause, Hunt’s metre emphasises congruence and inclusiveness; the clause or phrase typically ends with the line or at least the rhymed line, and the words themselves get cushioned by the anapaest (or dactyl) itself. Indeed, the principle of congruence may operate, paradoxically, in that most closed of classical forms, the heroic couplet, often employed by poets of the Fancy. Poets like Olson and Levertov, who promote the idea that the ideal line is congruent with the breath it takes to speak it, profess the proximity of such a line to nature itself; at the same time, such a line has the artificiality of ‘poetry’, something ‘made’ by a person and not at all organic. It is at this juncture that Hunt’s reading of Wordsworth becomes useful to an understanding of his intentions in The Feast.

Feasting Wordsworth

In the first edition of The Feast of the Poets (published in The Reflector in 1811) Hunt had criticised Wordsworth sharply, but had since shifted his view so that Wordsworth became ‘the greatest poet of the present’ (Feast (1815), p. 90). Mr. Wordsworth speaks less of the vulgar tongue of the profession than any writer since [the age of Collins]; he always thinks when he speaks, has always words at command, feels deeply, fancies richly, and never descends from that pure and elevated morality, which is the native region of the first order of poetical spirits. (Feast (1815), p. 88) Hunt defines modern poetry in terms of the association of thought with language. Such poetry becomes the domain of the sacred, a crucial observation that is reinforced by Wordsworth’s refusal to write in the ‘vulgar tongue’.5 Poetry is suffused with deep feeling and, through the Fancy (notice that there’s no mention of the Imagination) is not tied to the world. It is based upon a morality that (one sees from Hunt) acknowledges the centrality of the community. Wordsworth achieved success by recalling poetry, and the experience of its readers, to nature. To this extent Hunt finds him crucial to the renovation of poetry in the present age. Wordsworth’s problems, in Hunt’s view, arise from his (mis)interpretation of the natural. The poet of ‘thorns and duffelcloaks’ (Feast (1815), p. 95) has confounded the natural with the trivial, while his effort to write poetry with minimal ‘versification’ misconstrues the relationship between conscious artistry and artificiality in verse. Hunt finds that, ironically, Wordsworth creates poetry that appeals less to ‘the great and

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primary affections of our nature’: ‘it gives us puerility for simplicity, affectation for nature’ (Feast (1815), pp. 91–2; Feast, p. 93). The goal of simplicity, as a counter to the ‘gross and violent stimulants’ of modern urban society, turns out to reduce the possibilities of poetry and is in effect an antipoetic gesture. Hunt’s art is one of inclusion, one that (like Diderot’s, Brecht’s and Barthes’ art of the social ‘scene’ of real contradictions) embraces the conjunction of seeming incompatibles as truth. An art of inclusion is therefore potentially disturbing, and it produces Hunt’s poetry of thought. This isn’t necessarily a poetry of ‘ideas’, but a lyricism that stimulates the reader to think (Hunt, in this regard, regards Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems highly). Finally, his idea of poetry assumes a reading and thinking scene that is social and sociable: [Wordsworth] appears to me to have made a mistake unworthy of him, and to have sought by eccentricity and by a turning away from society, what he might have obtained by keeping to his proper and more neighbourly sphere. Had he written always in the spirit of the pieces above-mentioned [i.e. the ‘Lucy’ poems, the ‘Female Vagrant’, the London sonnets, the ‘Ode to Duty’ among others], his readers would have felt nothing but delight and gratitude; but another spirit interferes, calculated to do good neither to their taste nor reflections; and after having been elevated and depressed, refreshed and sickened, pained, pleased, and tortured, we close his volumes, as we finish a melancholy day, with feelings that would go to sleep in forgetfulness, and full waking faculties too busy to suffer it. (Feast (1815), pp. 90–1) Wordsworth had turned away from society in order to recover for his poems and his suffering audience a simplicity of life but, having turned away, had not returned to the human community. The remote and elemental lives to which Wordsworth is drawn supply images for poetry and, according to his thinking, a source of recovery from ‘the present age’ (Feast (1815), p. 91). Hunt describes Wordsworth’s endeavour in this respect as the ‘soundest good sense [and] the best poetical ambition’ (Feast (1815), p. 92)—except that Wordsworth carried his endeavour to ‘an excess that defeats the poet’s intention’ (Feast (1815), p. 95). Wordsworth ‘turns our thoughts away from society and men altogether, and nourishes that eremetical vagueness of sensation,—that making a business of reverie,—that despair of getting to any conclusion to any purpose, which is the next step to melancholy or indifference’ (Feast (1815), p. 97). The Wordsworth of 1815 is ‘marked as government property’ (Feast (1815), p. 99), according to Hunt, and by ‘making a business of reverie’ his poetry encourages the passivity, the ‘melancholy or indifference’, on which repressive government thrives.

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Hunt makes his final criticism of Wordsworth a subtle gesture of generosity: We are, he thinks, too much crowded together, and too subject, in consequence, to high-fevered tastes and worldly infections. Granted:— he, on the other hand, lives too much apart, and is subject, we think, to low-fevered tastes and solitary morbidities;—but as there is health in both of us, suppose both parties strike a bargain,—he to come among us a little more and get a true sense of our action,—we to go out of ourselves a little oftener and acquire a taste for his contemplation. We will make more holidays into nature with him; but he, in fairness, must earn them, as well as ourselves, by sharing our workingdays:—we will emerge oftener into his fields, sit dangling our legs over his styles, and cultivate a due respect for his daffodils; but he, on the other hand, must grow a little better acquainted with our streets, must put up with our lawyers, and even find out a heart or so among our politicians:—in short, we will recollect that we have hearts and brains, and will feel and ponder a little more to purify us as spirits; but he will be good enough, in return, to cast an eye on his hands and muscles, and consider that the putting these to their purposes is necessary to complete our part in this world as organized bodies. (Feast (1815), pp. 107–8) It’s an impressive statement that carries into poetic/critical practice the festival of poetic inclusion celebrated in The Feast of the Poets itself. This vision of openness— in the community and in the poem—is a form of ‘artifice’, which finally means a conscious shaping; the Fancy, for all its exuberance and dispersiveness, alights on realities and acknowledges desires; great poetry, says Hunt, has ‘fancy, feeling, knowledge’ (Feast (1815), p. 100). It’s not hard to conclude that, in the definition ripening in this long note, the fanciful is the poetical.

Translations: I

In 1814 and 1815 the notes to The Feast of the Poets are followed by Translations, &c’.6 Hunt’s translations exhibit a quality of the superfluous, the supplemental, printing the Latin source under the translation, so that the reader can witness his variations upon and departures from the original. Secondly, the themes of these poems amount to a commentary upon the book’s entire enterprise. Something fundamentally ‘poetic’, in the sense of a poetics of the Fancy, emerges in the translations. And, as a commentary on the failure to ‘clear up and simplicize’ in Wordsworth’s poems (Feast (1815), p. 97), the translations live as a series of motions and transformations, out of the given pathways of the original poems, that leave the reader open and receptive.

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The polemical spirit of the translations reinforces that of the book as a whole. In the 1814 Feast the final translation, ‘Bacchus, or the Pirates’ from Homer, joins with the Dionysian Apollo of The Feast of the Poets. Some pirates take on board a ‘blooming youth’ who, when bound, immediately breaks his bonds. A helmsman urges the crew to deposit him on land immediately lest this seeming divinity ‘call the winds about him, and we die’ (Feast, pp. 153, 154). But the ship’s captain disagrees, seeing in the youth a ‘god-send’ of possible wealth. No sooner has the captain insisted on his way than the captive, who is Dionysus himself, begins to transform the ship: ‘a fountain of sweet-smelling wine/Came gushing o’er the deck’ and ‘a vinetree over-ran the sail’ (Feast, p. 155). He changes into a lion and then a bear, and does away with captain and crew all of whom leap in terror into the sea where they are turned into dolphins. The helmsman, however, is befriended by Dionysus for his understanding and is promised happiness—‘“And well shall this day be, for thee and thine”’ (Feast, p. 157). This is a wonderful poem full of Bacchic vitality, and also one which reveals the consequences of attempting to deny the wine-god. Coming at the end of the volume (except for the sonnet addressed to an old school friend, Thomas Barnes), the poem restates the book’s poetics (albeit, in the translation, within a context of possible repression). Dionysus closely resembles Apollo in The Feast; he is beautiful, youthful and full of energies that have poetic consequences. So the two poems The Feast and ‘Bacchus, or the Pirates’, frame the book with Dionysian poetics. The last lines of Hunt’s translation emphasise the poetic context more overtly than the Greek original Must never bard forget thee in his song, Who mak’st it flow so sweetly and so strong. (Feast, p. 157) —a couplet which neatly summarises Hunt’s contention that Dionysus compels poetry that is both ‘sweet’ and also ‘strong’. The translations are casual, anti-monumental, literally superficial, and they celebrate cogeniality, friendship, love, transformation, desire, sexuality and the consequences of repression. The 1814 volume of The Feast of the Poets ends with the sonnet to Thomas Barnes, which reflects the intimacy of friendship that Hunt, Keats and others cultivated—in this instance the pleasure of such ‘whisp’ring’ and ‘working’ sounds as surface amidst the silence of ‘evening hours’ (Feast, p. 158). The sonnet celebrates the ‘noise of numerous bliss’—and we might think of this as a kind of gloss for the preceding translations and, perhaps, for the book as a whole.

Fancy’s advocate

The 1815 Feast of the Poets appeared during a three-year period that saw the publication of Wordsworth’s Poems (1815) and Coleridge’s Biographia

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Literaria (1817), two ‘monumental’ works that discuss the Fancy as a faculty standing in secondary relation to the Imagination. It is hard not to think of Hunt’s Feast and Foliage (1818) as efforts to counter Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s influence. In advocating the Fancy, Hunt urges a poetry of the supposedly trivial and the immature, the ephemeral and the light, the casual and playful, the scurrilous and immoral, the contradictory. One of the hardest tasks in the criticism of a poet like Hunt is to discover the challenging seriousness of books that are tagged from the outset as ‘trivial’ or ‘dilettantish’ when set beside Wordsworthian/Coleridgean claims for the imagination. How, in a poetic society that honours Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and (at times) Pope, can one take such a programme seriously? At one point in the The Descent of Liberty (1814) ‘Poetry’ appears and speaks in visionary tetrameters; she is described in a way that dramatically separates the ‘image’ of Regency poetry from that of the earlier generation: she ‘is in a robe of carnation or flesh-colour, scarfed with green, her wings like the bird of Paradise, her head crowned with laurel and surmounted by a lambent fire, and a magic wand in her hand’ (PWLH, p. 303). The nearkitsch quality of some of the imagery bespeaks a highly energised, hopeful and visionary poetics that is also self-conscious about the nature of the natural in poetry. All of this is manifest in Hunt’s major volume of poems Foliage (1818), a confident Mischgedicht (made up of a mixture of genres) with a Preface-manifesto that calls for the recovery of the genuine poetic tradition. Significantly, it was the short-line poem ‘Fancy’s Party. A Fragment’ (Foliage, pp. xxxix–xliii) which upset the critics, indicating to them an extreme irreverence—in poetics, in sexuality, and in the implication of a ‘party’ of opposition (indeed, another title for The Feast of the Poets might have been ‘Fancy’s Party’). It was ‘Fancy’s Party’ that Blackwood’s Magazine singled-out as the representative piece in the book: it was ‘Jupiter drinking tea at Hampstead with Mr and Mrs Hunt and Mr Hazlitt!’ and ‘a debauch of two Cockney’s, Hunt and Hazlitt’.7 Based less on the idea of a political party and more upon the energies of ‘sociality’, passion, intellect and ‘invention’, ‘Fancy’s Party’ gives us a poetry of play, welcoming tolerance of difference and multiplicity of viewpoints, the ‘multiple’ in poetry itself. The epigraph from Manilius’s Astronomicon—‘Juvat ire per ipsum/Aera, et immense spatiantem vivere coelo’, and Hunt’s translation of it, We take our pleasure through the very air, And breathing the great heav’n, expatiate there set the terms for ‘Fancy’s Party’ and its poetics. Hunt’s rendering of firstcentury Latin into early nineteenth-century vernacular English revises the original away from a mythic/scientific intention to a poetic one. The Latin

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lines come from a proem to Manilius’s poetic treatise that praises the Pax Romana and its emperor for the opportunity to study the stars in necessary leisure. In Hunt’s epigraph, Manilius’s indefinite pronoun (iuvat, it pleases) becomes ‘We take our pleasures’, denoting the community, or party, or brotherhood of poets. And Hunt’s verb bestows more will, strength and activity on the part of the subject. ‘To take pleasure’ replaces the comparatively bland ‘ire’, to go, and mixes action with affect. The general ‘vivere’ becomes ‘breathing’, while ‘spatiantem’ which primarily means ‘to wander’ settles into its English ‘expatiate’: we take our pleasure in wandering at large with our copious word-breathings. Manilius at this point makes no specific reference to speech, whereas Hunt rests his case in poetic language that is literally an inspiration of the universe—‘breathing the great heav’n’. ‘Fancy’s Party’ is an ungainly, inelegant-looking poem, with its already short-lined stanzas emaciated in the middle (lines shrinking to dimeters), its ‘feminine’ endings (in the first part of the piece) and ‘nonce’ lines amidst the rhymes, the casual shift from seven to eight lines per stanza, the break-off into asterisks with which the poem concludes. The reviews squirmed, one imagines, not only because of the poem’s political implications (‘the Monarch of Olympus and the Lecturer [Hazlitt] at the Surrey Institution’, BM (October 1819), p. 72) but because of its form and execution. It is—as the outraged reviewers said about Keats’s early heroic couplets—a ‘loose’ poem. Thematically, too, the poem jars. Nature, in the opening stanza, is loosely mixed with a suburban commodity culture of ‘busts and flowers,/And pictured bowers’ (see also Elizabeth Jones’s chapter in the present volume). The poem has no stability; it eschews in every way the possibility of the poem-as-monument, offering instead a succession of spontaneities, one stanza beginning: ‘And hey, what’s this?’ And it’s a poem of ‘now’s: And now and now I see them… And now they are bent… Now we loosen-now-take care;… What a lovely motion now… Now we pierce the chilly shroud… Now we issue forth to light,… Counter-poetics in the past 200 years has focused less on the final product and more upon representing a process of mind as quick moving ‘from perception to perception’ (Charles Olson). 8 ‘Now’ is the essential conjunction for this mental operation. Hunt, in his wonderful essay ‘A Now, Descriptive of a Hot Day’ (Indicator, 28 June 1820, pp. 300–1), understands the word more in terms of its related property, the creation of the combination, that juxtaposition of the unlike, not to be ‘reconciled’ but to be acknowledged as a fact of reality: ‘that masterly conjunction, which possesses the very essence of wit, for it has the talent of bringing the most

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remote things together. And it’s generosity is in due proportion to it’s talent, for it always is most profuse of it’s aid, where it is most wanted’ (Indicator, 28 June, 1820, p. 302). A mind moving quickly among perceptions inevitably encounters, by chance, contradictory elements (‘opposites’ in the language of Coleridgean Romantic theory). A poetry of such combinations—reaching its most sensationally theorised and practised in Surrealism—assumes that the world or the referent has greater importance and inherent interest than the lyric subject. It also embodies more overtly desire as a key presence in the visionary perception of the world. Desire appears in ‘Fancy’s Party’ partially through a covert homoerotic language: ‘comes’, ‘rise’, ‘spots of bliss’ (instead of spots of time!), ‘rapture dissipates/The picture it anticipates’, ‘loosen’, ‘mounting’, ‘We have shot the night with a pierce’, join in one sensation’, ‘Active, without toil or stress;/ Passive, without listlessness’. This was not lost on the reviewers who referred to the poem as a ‘debauch’ between Hunt and Hazlitt. The poem, so apparently unlike its Dada and Surrealist descendants, anticipates their attachment to reality (notice how ‘feel’ rhymes with ‘real’) and to critical social comment—while seeming to have escaped as in a balloon flight. Since Edmund Burke’s condemnation of the Jacobins as the ‘aeronauts of France’, ballooning had been associated with speculative political and philosophical schemes which were often condemned as ‘fanciful’ in the sense that they were dangerously unrestrained and ‘lunatic’ (hence the ‘double moon’ in Hunt’s poem). Hunt gives us Fancy as an untrammelled expression of the revolutionary spirit, ‘Not an effort, not a will, / Yet proceeding swiftly still’.9 In all of these ways ‘Fancy’s Party’ supports the manifesto of Foliage. In the Preface Hunt claims that the ‘poetic faculty’ in England has ‘reawakened’ and that it is an enlargement of the French School’s (i.e. neoclassical) ‘narrow sphere of imagination’ (Foliage, p. 11). If the Fancy takes the mind to new domains, the imagination, contra Coleridge, says Hunt, has ‘the power to see, with verisimilitude, what others do not’ (Foliage, p. 13). Such poetry demonstrates ‘a sensativeness to the beauty of the external world, to the unsophisticated impulses of our nature’ (Foliage, p. 13; sic). Poetry, like his own Story of Rimini, ought to be ‘tolerant and reconciling, recommending men’s minds to the consideration of first causes in misfortune, and to see the danger of confounding forms with justice, of setting authorized selfishness above the most natural impulses, and making guilt by mistaking innocence’ (Foliage, p. 17). That ‘Fancy’s Party’ does not cover all of these requirements, indeed seems singularly lacking in seriousness, speaks to a perceived need for an estranged poetics which (in a Blakean sense) pierces the ‘sightenfolding cloud’. In Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828) Hunt, defending Shelley as poet and humanitarian, answers criticism of Shelley for his personal excesses: A greater portion of will among reformers is desirable; but it does not follow that an occasional excess of it (if such) can or does do the mischief

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he supposes, or furnishes any excuse worth mention for the outcries and pretended arguments of the opposite party. If he will have a good deal of will, he must occasionally have an excess of it. The party in question, that is to say, all the bad systems and governments existing, with all their slaves and dependents, have an infinite will of their own, which they already make use of, with all their might, to put down every endeavour against it: and the world in general is so deafened with the noise of ordinary things, and the great working of the system which abuses it, that an occasional excess in the lifting up of a reforming voice appears to be necessary to make it listen.10 Hunt’s voice in Foliage is not amplified in the way that ‘the lifting up of a reforming voice’ suggests; nevertheless, what he says about Shelley could well apply to Foliage, and to poetry that is ‘a spring from earth’ to ‘make it listen’.

The poetics of (im-)maturity

Published a year after another leafiness, Coleridge’s Sibylline Leaves, Hunt’s Foliage turns away from the vatic, the mysterious and the portentous to a strange mixture of the urbane and the fanciful, but always ‘green’, ‘genial’ and ‘breathing’. Since Romanticism (if not somewhat before) a major tradition in the valuation of lyric poetry of the West has considered ‘maturity’ a positive critical measure. The poet ought to exploit the gift of the muses to proximate eternity—in wisdom and perspective, in archaisms that demonstrate poetry’s affinity with the ages, and through the capacity to absorb grief into a larger set of human correspondences. That is no country for old men’, says the poet sailing to Byzantium, defining the world poetry leaves behind (‘The young/In one another’s arms’), and projecting a highmodernist trajectory that persists in classrooms, journals and publishing houses.11 Poetry, from Romanticism on, has been called great when it leans towards the ‘tragic’, the ‘melancholic’, the ‘realistic’ and the death-filled—all of which predispositions are only available to the ‘mature’, of whatever age. This Yeatsian version of the tradition, that the life must be sacrificed to art in order to achieve artistic authenticity, is the reigning configuration for poetry which the mature poet acknowledges.12 The structure of Foliage contrasts dramatically with the Wordsworthian paradigm of an organic growth: from poetry of youth to poetry of old age; from poetry of the fancy to poetry of the imagination; from the ‘dawn’ of life to maturity. All of this bears little relation to a book that opens with a ‘Preface, including Cursory Observations on Poetry and Cheerfulness’, and then offers a quasi-erotic fantasy ‘The Nymphs’, the scurrilous jeu d’esprit of ‘Fancy’s Party’, a set of occasional poems about married love and children, a group of epistles to his friends (Byron, Moore, Hazlitt, Barron Field,

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Lamb), some sociable sonnets and a set of apparently miscellaneous translations (Homer, Theocritus and Catullus). This book has immaturity written all over it, and it is hard—with Wordsworth and Coleridge publishing their ambitious opera at the same time—to take it seriously unless one examines the judgement of immaturity as a complex code for an altogether different poetics. Foliage does contain a carefully worked structure, the outlines of which I will now trace. The first poem, ‘The Nymphs’, begins with an invocation to the muse that directs the reader to think in terms of the child-like and the immature: Spirit, who waftest me where’er I will, And seest, with finer eyes, what infants see, Feeling all lovely truth With the wise health of everlasting youth, Beyond the motes of Bigotry’s sick eye, Or the blind feel of false Philosophy,— O Spirit, O Muse of mine, Frank, and quick-dimpled to all social glee, And yet most sylvan of the earnest Nine, Who on the fountain-shedding hill, Leaning about among the clumpy bays Look at the clear Apollo while he plays;— Take me, now, now, and let me stand On some such lovely land, Where I may feel me, as I please, In dells among the trees… (Foliage, pp. v–vi) Visionary poetry comes from Apollo-as-child, and Hunt associates the cultivation of this source with ‘the wise health of everlasting youth’ and with a vision ‘Beyond the motes of Bigotry’s sick eye’. ‘The Nymphs’ depicts the excited mind of a person who travels to a different domain, beyond ordinary consciousness, and describes what he sees. The objects of vision and the mode of envisioning feed each other; if it feels like a child-at-play, it may be because this poem is not one of contemplation but of quick dartings of perceptions; often it isn’t clear whether the objects are imagined or actually seen, but the eroticising of them is evident at every point: Nor can I see the lightsome-footed maids, The Oreads, that frequent the lifted mountains; Though by the Muses’ help I still might shew, How some go leaping by the laughing fountains Down the touched crags; and some o’er deep ravines Sit listening to the talking streams below; And some in sloping glades

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Of pines lie musing, or betwixt high screens Of fern and flowers; or, like pavilioned queens Covered from heat of the blue silent skies, Sit perfumed underneath the cedarn shades, Feeding the gazel [sic] with his lamping eyes. (Foliage, p. xiii) The motion in the world comes towards us in the poetics: correspondences, the poetics of parataxis, enumeratio. Everything exists in vital relationship to everything else, ‘feeding’ and being fed—a building network of intransitives that includes the act of perceiving. As Keats said in a particularly Huntian moment: There was wide wand’ring for the greediest eye’.13 Occasional six-syllable lines show the speaker moving into a visionary idiom. Late in the poem, for example, he actually hears the nymphs sing, and the line drops from its customary ten to eight syllables: Ho! We are the Nepheliads, we, Who bring the clouds from the great sea, And have within our happy care All the love ‘twixt earth and air. We it is with soft new showers Wash the eyes of the young flowers; And with many a silvery comer In the sky, delight the summer; And our bubbling freshness bringing, Set the thirsty brooks a singing, Till they run for joy, and turn Every mill-wheel down the burn. (Foliage, p. xxxi–xxxii) This ‘visionary’ line comes from Ariel in The Tempest, Milton’s ‘cheerful’ speaker in ‘L’Allegro’, and the Lady in Milton’s Comus. The Milton connection associates this use of the octosyllabic line with the overthrow of the tyrannical Comus and thus fits in ‘The Nymphs’ as the line that opposes ‘bigotry’ and tyranny (cf. also its use in The Descent of Liberty). A playful line, it is easy to think of it as somehow less ‘mature’ than the decasyllabics which are linked to a normative consciousness. In ‘The Nymphs’, however, the octosyllabics represent the same ‘looseness’ of poetic decorum and, by implication, politics and social/sexual morals that the reviewers found in Keats’s early, Huntian heroic couplets. Epistles and sonnets

What can we expect of a book that begins with ‘The Nymphs’ followed by ‘Fancy’s Party’? In the next three sections of Foliage (poems about love and

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love-of-children, verse epistles, and sonnets)—we find the poetics of ‘The Nymphs’ and ‘Fancy’s Party’ welcomed into the domain of social and domestic life. Several of the Epistles, for example, are written in rhymed anapaestic tetrameters and bubble over with ‘sociality’. As occasional poems they confirm the Fancy’s anti-monumental insistence. Thomas Moore, for example, is introduced as a poet of sparkling surfaces—always in motion and in pleasure: Dear Tom, who enjoy your brooks and your bowers, Live just like a bee, when he’s flushest of flowers,— A maker of sweets, busy, sparkling, and singing, Yet armed with an exquisite point too for stinging,— I owe you a letter… (Foliage, pp. lxxviii–lxxix) The bee, with its playful/erotic/Anacreontic associations, pitched to Moore’s temperament and style, is taken as an emblem for an idyllic poetry of sensuous surfaces: Even now while I write, I’m half stretched on the ground With a cheek-smoothing air coming taking me round, Betwixt hillocks of green, plumbed with fern and wild flowers, While my eye closely follows the bees in their bowers. People talk of ‘poor insects’, (although, by the way, Your old friend, Anacreon, was wiser than they); But lord, what a set of delicious retreats The epicures live in,—shades, colours, and sweets! (Foliage, p. lxxxi) The ‘reclining poet’ topos in eighteenth-century poetry I believe stands for a new poetry of surfaces and presents: the body touches the ground at many points and areas—surface against surface. The poem records the experience of touch, or taste as a form of touch; the bee is the aerial version of the poet’s reclining body, touching point after point of sweet taste, producing when projected into poetic language a poetry of correspondences or sequenced relationships of elements, noted from ‘now’ to ‘now’. The body’s sinking onto the ground is recorded as the weight of pleasures, or is it a weightlessness of ‘delicious’, ‘sparkling’, motions? We’ve seen already how the poetry of the Fancy is routinely described as immature, when juxtaposed with the claims of the ‘mature’ imagination. But upon arriving at the Epistle ‘To William Hazlitt’, one realises that any association of fanciful poetry with the childish (‘boy’s play’) has been modified to register more positively energy, ingenuousness, social consciousness and idealism, and a desire to disrupt convention. The link from the poems to Moore to the brilliant, caustic and subversive intellect of Hazlitt comes through touch:

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Dear Hazlitt, whose tact intellectual is such That it seems to feel truth, as one’s fingers do touch,— Who in politics, arts, metaphysics, poetics, To critics in these times, are health to cosmetics, And nevertheless,—or I rather should say, For that very reason,—can relish boy’s play, And turning on all sides, through pleasures and cares, Find nothing more precious than laughs and fresh airs… (Foliage, pp. xc–xci) The poem turns upon relative claims of the country and the city, and throughout Hunt maintains a witty intimacy and irreverence towards conventional middle-class life and ‘bigotry’. More than any other poem in Foliage this one links Hunt’s fanciful style of playfulness and quickwittedness with serious cultural politics. An evening with Hunt and Hazlitt, the poem tells us, would be a breezy tour through music, wine, a walk, food and, of course, talk, tasting these things in friendship, but fully alive and not sunk into or wholly ‘absorbed’ in or by any one of them. This is the ‘irreverent’ cultural disposition that some reviewers singled-out for derision: ‘Jupiter drinking tea at Hampstead with Mr and Mrs Hunt and Mr Hazlitt’— Then tea made by one, who (although my wife she be), If Jove were to drink it, would soon be his Hebe; Then silence a little,—a creeping twilight,— Then an egg for your supper, with lettuces white, And a moon and friend’s arm to go home with at night. (Foliage, p. xciv) The reviewers objected to Hunt’s apparently undiscriminating inclusiveness of country/city, play/seriousness, society/myth, suburban inconsequence/ Olympian authority. Blackwood’s, for example, commented on the passage above that ‘we have “the love of sociality, of the country and of the fine imagination of the Greeks”, all in one’.14 The cluster of twenty sonnets that follows ‘To William Hazlitt’ begins with a ‘Description of Hampstead’, Hampstead here representing an inclusive terrain where country and city merge: ‘Streets, hills, and dells’, ‘revelling in varieties’ (Foliage, p. cxv). In place of a Wordsworthian depth of response are social feelings, intimacies, playfulness, and fancy-filled (‘haunted’) minds: ‘Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes’ (Foliage, p. cxxvii). At the end of one of his sonnets on receiving a lock of Milton’s hair Hunt writes, In me/Behold affectionate eternity’ (Foliage, p. cxxxii), a lovely paradox which also describes his poetics. ‘Eternity’ in poetry implies the sacrificial relationship between art and life, but Hunt seeks a non-sacrificial relationship where life flows directly into art and back again and is based upon the affections. Poetry exists to improve

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the human health of the community: ‘Patience and Gentleness is Power’ (Foliage, p. cxxxii). Taken altogether, the group of sonnets in Foliage create an image of the ‘busy hum’ of the human community at its most congenial, its most loving, its least vulgar and least bigoted.

Translations: II

‘The Translations in the present work are in the same spirit as the original poems…written from the same love of nature, and in the same cause of cheerfulness’ (Foliage, p. 30–31). The phrase, ‘the cause of cheerfulness’, indicates the fervour of the manifesto—cheerfulness as the sparking of relationship, and of community productive of good; genial, feeling, working consciously, though naturally, against the oppression of the dominant culture. In the London 1818 edition of Foliage Hunt collects his own work under the rubric of ‘Original Poems’ and paginates them with Roman numerals, thus suggesting that they are introductory to the main business of the book which are the ‘Translations’, paginated in arabic. Can we infer that the ‘Translations’ for Hunt represented the quintessence of a poetics of the Fancy? When compared to the occasional poetry in Foliage, the translations feels very much like a ‘flight’ to the mythic/poetic world of ancient Greece. The movement essential to the Fancy (discussed above in relation to ‘Fancy’s Party’) is literally represented in the selection and ordering of the book’s materials. And as Hunt says that the ‘main features are, a love of sociality, of the country, and of the fine imagination of the Greeks’ (Foliage, p. 18) he means that his translations constitute his culminating intention. Poetry he defines not in terms of originality, which stands in an introductory or subsidiary relationship, but as a genial mediation, giving to the ‘intelligent reader…a stronger sense of the natural energy of the original [Homer and the Greek pastoralists and lyricists], than has yet been furnished him’ (Foliage, p. 31). The Greek poets contain a ‘natural energy’, and the task of the translator is in keeping with that of the poet of the Fancy—to direct the modern reader’s attention to the sources of life that the ancient poems embody. This has to do less with literal translation than with the recovery of primary, formative energies. Hunt’s translations in Foliage, particularly of Homer and Theocritus, seem to me first-rate. At times the passages from the Iliad and the Odyssey breathe (as Hunt might say) with the same freshness as Lattimore’s or Fitzgerald’s versions. With Homer he is most revisionist and most polemical: Pope’s Homer he calls an ‘elegant mistake’ with verses of ‘smooth little toys’ (Foliage, pp. 31–2); Pope’s and others’ translations he says are full of ‘gratuitous and vague talking’ (Foliage, p. 32). Of the pastoral poems he says that their ‘real genius and character the public have hitherto had no idea whatsoever given them by the translators’, and therefore he ‘resolved, at all events, to write in blank verse, as their great charm is sentiment, and a perfectly unshackled

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simplicity’ (Foliage, p. 33). His own translations are simple, written with almost no drift towards archaism, either in diction or syntax. The blank-verse versions from the Iliad catch the sense of conflict that one expects in the epic, deploying alliteration, double accents, strong caesurae: And thrice did the Ajaces, springy-strength’d, Thrust him [Hector] away; yet still he kept his ground, Sure of his strength; and now and then rushed on, Into the thick, and now and then stood still, Shouting great shouts;—and not an inch gave he. (Foliage, p. 4) The beautiful blank-verse translations from Theocritus’s Idylls reject the standard conflictual relationship between line and syntax for what feels like a (postmodern) poetics of congruence; the enjambments act inaudibly upon the slight tension created by abrogating the line-break, as Hunt seems intent upon recovering the ‘stream’ of poetry’s ur-language, a poetry, in Schiller’s sense, of the ‘naive’: Ageanax, if he forgets me not His faithful friend, shall safely cross the seas To Mitylene, both when the south wind, Warned by the westering kids, adds wet to wet, And when Orion dips his sparkling feet. Let halcyons smooth the billows, and make still The west wind and the fiercer east, which stirs The lowest sea-weeds;—halcyons, of all birds Dear to the blue-eyed Nymphs, and fed by them. Let all things favour the kind voyager, And land him safely;—and that day, will I, Wearing a crown of roses or white violets, Quaff by my fire-side Pteleatic wine; And some one shall dress beans; and I will have A noble couch, to lie at ease upon, Heaped up of asphodel and yielding herbs; And there I’ll drink, in a divine repose, Calling to mind Ageanax, and drain With clinging lips the goblet to the dregs…. And Tityrus shall sing also, how of old The goatherd by his cruel lord was bound, And left to die in a great chest; and how The busy bees, up coming from the meadows To the sweet cedar, fed him with soft flowers, Because the Muse had filled his mouth with nectar. (Foliage, pp. 26–8)

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It is interesting to contrast this ‘pastoralising’ with blank verse by Coleridge and Wordsworth, which magnificently calls attention to the imago vocis of the speaker’s mind. Here, the speaker self-silences amid images of a collective, mythic nature which spread out to fill each line like a pool of water. The poetry of the Fancy tends to define the lyric subject less insistently, encouraging a continuum between subject and object, or a loss of distinction between them. This is akin to what Timothy Morton calls an ‘ambient’ condition, in which the space between subject and object (Blake’s dark blue space of vast distances of self-conscious alienation) is filled, a visionary perception of an atmosphere in which we live.15 Hunt’s final Homeric translation—Mercury’s landing on Calypso’s island in Odyssey V—distinguishes itself from Pope, Fitzgerald and Lattimore by insisting upon an ambience in which Hermes participates. Most translations of this passage, as well as the original, turn—once Hermes has landed—to Calypso and her Edenic ‘bower’ (Pope); Hermes fades before its brilliance. But Hunt refers all the sensory power of the setting back to perception of the god of thresholds: He paus’d; and there came on him, as he stood, A smell of citron and of cedar wood, That threw a perfume all about the isle; And she within sat spinning all the while, And sang a lovely song, that made him hark and smile. (Foliage, p. 19) The bower, moreover, in contrast to that of the original and the other translations, pushes a Dionysian allusion in a manner that recalls the translation of the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus. Whereas Pope says: ‘Depending vines the shelving cavern screen,/With purple clusters blushing thro’ the green’, Hunt revises this to: The cave in front was spread with a green vine,/Whose dark round bunches almost burst with wine…’ (Foliage, p. 20). The bower becomes the locus of an intensely pleasurable erotic and perceptual confusion, which then becomes identified with the god of transformations: ‘And so admiring, there stood Mercury’. Although it would prove fruitful to follow the details of Hunt’s verbal decisions in translation, I prefer now to survey and comment on the content and the sequence of the translations as a culmination of the poetics of the Fancy. Hermes’ flight to Calypso’s island, his ‘admiring’ wonder, the dissolution of subject—object distinctions, all come to represent the purpose and effect of the translations in Foliage. The concluding section of Translations’ identifies these poems as expansive horizons, akin to Keats’s ‘realms of gold’, and in this way Foliage creates a community of poetries which intersects with a major theme in the translations themselves.

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The passages from the Iliad show community to be a problem, at best an overcoming of tragic distances. Hunt begins with the passage of Achilles’ return to the field of war on hearing about the death of Patroclus; this section concludes with the ‘community’ of Achilles and his comrades weeping over the body of the ‘beloved companion’. The Theocritean passages are ‘happyminded’, ‘golden times when the belov’d loved too’ (‘The Lover’, Foliage, p. 41). The last Theocritean poem, here called ‘The Rural Concert’, invokes two presiding figures of the Fancy, the Nymphs and Pan: Now play me something sweet, for the Nymphs’ sake, Upon the double flutes. Come, I will take My bow, and touch out something to begin; And Daphnis here with pleasure will throw in His wax-cemented breaths.—We’ll seat us there Behind the cave, close by the oak’s old hair, And through the leaves wake Pan with a sweet air. (Foliage, p. 61) The reference to the Nymphs brings us back to the opening poem of the book, a re-introduction of the Nymphs-of-Fancy in the mode of translation, occasioning a new self-consciousness in the midst of the naive. These flittings back and forth are the image of translation, so that the reader can become a kind of Hermes encountering the other with wonderment. Yet Hunt doesn’t rest within this pastoral mode; the poems of Bion and Moschus allude to modes beyond the idyllic but still within the frame of the Fancy. In Bion’s ‘The Teacher Taught’ the poet who has been teaching Cupid ‘the pastoral songs’ is taught the poetry of love by its master: ‘I forgot all I taught’, the poet confesses, ‘But all he taught to me, I learnt by heart’ (Foliage, p. 66). Similarly, Moschus’s famous ‘Elegy on the Death of Bion’ appears as the passing of not only pastoral but of all love lyrics for the sake of the ‘dirge’. Elegy, however, is not the idiom in which Foliage concludes; the translation from Moschus is followed by those of Anacreon (in the spirit of Tom Moore), one of which, ‘The Dance’, spoken by an old man, makes the Huntian case perfectly: Grey-beard age away be flung, And I’ll join ye, young for young. Some one then go fetch me wine Of a vintage rare and fine, And I’ll shew what age can do,— Able still to warble too, Able still to drink down sadness, And display a graceful madness. (Foliage, p. 87)

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Hunt had said in the Preface: ‘the Anacreontics, I fear, are worth little, except a few lines at intervals;—it is so difficult to transplant those delicate Greek flowers into rhyme, without rendering them either languid and diffuse, or too much cramping them up’ (Foliage, p. 32). Yet in this poem age is overcome by Bacchic energy; if Anacreon’s poems are indeed ‘delicate’, they rage none the less against the dying light: Crown me then; I’ll play the lyre, Bacchus, underneath thy shade: Heap me, heap me higher and higher, And I’ll lead a dance of fire With a dark deep-bosom’d maid. (‘Roses’, Foliage, p. 84) Hunt’s final translation from Anacreon, ‘The Seat under the Tree’, alludes to Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’, especially the lines ‘Dull would he be of soul who could pass by/A sight so touching in its majesty’ and ‘The river glideth at its own sweet will’: Here’s the place to seat us, love! A perfect arbour! Look above, How the delicate sprays, like hair, Bend them to the breaths of air! Listen, too! It is a rill, Telling us it’s gentle will. Who that knows what luxury is, Could go by a place like this? (‘The Seat under the Tree’, Foliage, p. 88) Unlike the Wordsworthian ‘calm so deep’ experienced as a solitary exaltation, Hunt’s sociable poem has a vital, sensual engagement, ‘Look above… Listen, too!’. It is a shock to turn the page and find ‘Atys’ from Catullus, its ungainly sixteen-syllable lines mixed with short lines, and its perversely sexual, violent subject matter—a poem of ‘zealous frenzy’ (Foliage, p. 92). Atys, driven mad by the goddess Cybele (for too much worship? for falling in love with another woman? there are various source myths, and Catullus doesn’t specify which one drives his poem), castrates himself ‘with flinty knife’ (Foliage, p. 92). The poem ends with the narrator’s unabashedly self-interested cry: O Goddess! Mistress! Cybele! Dread name! O mighty Pow’r! O Dindymenian dame! Far from my home thy visitations be: Drive others mad, not me: Drive others into impulse wild and fierce insanity! (Foliage, p. 99)

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At the poem’s centre is the memory of home, and the society of ‘kindred, friends, and native soil’ (Foliage, p. 97) abandoned for a ‘hapless’ obsession. Hunt himself anticipated the reader’s bewilderment at finding this grim poem of self-mutilation and despairing, suicidal isolation inserted as the penultimate leaf in Foliage: I need not apologize to such readers as I address, for the plain-speaking in the translation of Atys. I think that voluptuousness, in the proper sense, is rather an ill-used personage; but grossness I abominate; there is neither in this poem; and he would be guilty of the real grossness, the essence of which is inapplicability and degradation, who should not see that all other associations in it are overcome by its gravity and awefulness. It comes among the other pieces, indeed, like a spectre at noon-day; yet it is not unsuited to the general disposition of the work; still less is it a mere tale of horror, easy to imagine, or with excitement only for exhausted or callous nerves. It is one of the most striking lessons ever thrown out against a gloomy and ascetic enthusiasm, whatever fantastic sacrifice it may think fit to make, or whatever may be its notion of a tyrannical deity. (Foliage, pp. 33–4) Hunt explains that the poem is a warning against solitary passion or ‘gloomy and ascetic enthusiasm’ as contrary to Foliages more sociable ‘general disposition’. Melancholy, or ‘disappointment’ as Hazlitt says, lies at the root of much Romantic poetry; Hunt’s translation of the ‘Atys’ is his effort to deconstruct—by the violence and anti-sociality of the tale—the ‘morbid abstractions’ (Feast (1815) p. 97) that he had seen as a limitation, and even a danger, in the poetry of Wordsworth. In ‘Atys’ Hunt traces the violent, selfdestructive effects of ‘diseased perceptions’ akin to the ‘extremity’ of vision he had found in Wordsworth’s poems (see Feast (1815) pp. 93–7). That a ‘Nuptial Song’ follows ‘Atys’, and concludes Foliage, indicates Hunt’s belief that, rightly tempered, poetry may release society and poetry itself into a comic outcome. We have been at Fancy’s party, witnesses to Hunt’s crafting of a counterpoetics to engage with, and answer, the Wordsworth/Coleridge poetics which, until recently, dominated accounts of British Romanticism. Given that in recent years the Romantic canon has expanded, we might now see Hunt’s principled focusing on the world—‘cheerful’ but thought-ful, outward-turned and sociable—as characteristic of our new image of Romantic literary culture. Notes 1 Charles Bernstein, ‘Artifice of Absorption’, in A Poetics (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 9–89.

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See Cox, especially chapter 3. See the Preface to PWLH (1832), p. xxxvi–vii. See textual apparatus in PJK, p. 356. Hunt’s praise for Wordsworth’s poetic language identifies qualities that for Coleridge indicated Wordsworth’s failure, or inability, to write poetry ‘in “a selection of the REAL language of men”’; see Biographia Literaria, ed. Walter Jackson Bate and James Engell, CC, VII, 2 vols, II: p. 55. Feast concludes with translations from Catullus, Horace, Seneca, Homer and a sonnet ‘To T___ B___, ESQ. Written from Hampstead’. In 1815 Hunt added five sonnets to Hampstead, and a sonnet ‘To T.M.Alsager, Esq. With the Author’s Miniature, on leaving Prison’; also included were ‘Politics and Poetics’, ‘Song’, ‘National Song’ and ‘A Thought on Music’. BM (October 1819), p. 72. ‘Projective Verse’ in Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 17. For Romantic ballooning and the French Revolution, see Jane Stabler, Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 132–5. Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (2nd edn, 2 vols, London: Henry Colburn, 1828), I: p. 349. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ from The Tower (1928), quoted from The Collected Poems of W.B.Yeats (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1950; 1978). The poet Philip Levine recalls that he had been impressed by how Keats refused the sacrificial equation and drew poetry from the continuum of his life. The question of Keats’s poetic ‘maturity’ or ‘immaturity’ has preoccupied readers from the reviewers of his 1817 volume to the present. Aside from innate predispositions, Keats drew on Hunt’s poetics in fashioning his anti-monumental verse. See Phillip Levine, The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A.Sharp (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), p. 206. ‘I stood tip-toe’, line 15, PJK, p. 79. BM (October 1819), p. 72; my emphasis. See Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 215–35.

10

Conceiving disgust Leigh Hunt, William Gifford and the Quarterly Review Kim Wheatley

In his Autobiography (1850) Leigh Hunt accuses William Gifford, editor of the Tory Quarterly Review, of a ‘mixture of implacability and servility’ in his writings as a satirist and a reviewer (II: p. 92). Hunt declares that Gifford is ‘the only man I ever attacked, respecting whom I have felt no regret’ (II: p. 87). The antipathy was mutual: Hunt recalls a face-to-face encounter with Gifford, who stared at him with loathing.1 Hunt claims in a later chapter of the Autobiography that the ‘wrath of the Tory critics’ (II: p. 172) was motivated solely by politics, and recent commentators on the Blackwood’s ‘Cockney School’ essays have emphasised how Hunt was seen as a political threat to the Tory reviewers.2 What Samuel Taylor Coleridge once called the ‘game’ of reviewing often had no clear winners or out-and-out losers (Biographia Literaria, CC, 7, II: p. 157). Hunt’s ‘war’ with Gifford was a commonplace of literary gossip, yet its long duration indicates that it involved something more, or other, than a clash of personalities or ideologies.3 In this chapter I explore the feud between Hunt and Gifford as it unfolded from The Feast of the Poets to Ultra-Crepidarius. I want to suggest how Hunt’s skirmishes with the Quarterly and its editor tended to be repetitive, and that this pattern reflected Hunt’s awareness, in his Autobiography, that in his confrontations with authority he required a vicarious ‘sense of support’.4 When faced with anonymous reviews in the Quarterly Hunt was obliged to recapitulate aspects of his earlier encounters with Gifford, so revealing his need to find a compelling cause beyond his own immediate situation. This necessarily led to repetition, and in the closing pages of this chapter I shall suggest how in his satire Ultra-Crepidarius Hunt attempted a creative resolution to a dilemma arising from the conditions of contemporary reviewing and from a trait in his own personality. Why did Hunt continue to loathe Gifford long after his death? In his Autobiography Hunt reveals he had ‘conceived some disgust against [Gifford] as a man’ (II: p. 86)—strong words from the proponent of social tolerance and good cheer.5 Hunt took the initiative in attacking Gifford, but did not dominate in the ensuing dialogue. He had quoted approvingly from Gifford’s 1795 satire The Maeviad in his Critical Essays of 1807, but afterwards

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criticised Gifford, in verse and in prose, in The Feast of the Poets (1811–15). In The Feast Hunt was attempting to satirise a writer who was himself one of the foremost satirists of the preceding generation. As editor of the Quarterly Gifford could no longer dispose of his opponents as decisively as he had done in the 1790s when, as editor of the governmentsponsored Anti-Jacobin, he still had plenty of ‘power’, as Steven Jones puts it, ‘to abuse’—the power of Juvenalian outrage.6 Although Hunt later claimed that ‘the new satirist had ceased to regard the old one as a “critical authority” ’ (Autobiography, II: p. 86), Gifford’s institutional role still carried critical weight. Gifford published in the Quarterly a harsh review of Hunt’s Story of Rimini (1816), and the Quarterly continued its jibes at Hunt in subsequent reviews of writers belonging to his circle. Hunt struck back at the Quarterly more often than he did at the elusive Z of Blackwood’s, presumably because in Gifford he had an individual to target; in fact, though, Gifford was not responsible for all of the reviews to which Hunt responded. Hunt published several counterattacks on his friends’ behalf in the Examiner, and followed these with To a Spider Running across a Room’ in the third number of the Liberal (1823).7 A climax of the feud was Hunt’s UltraCrepidarius (1823), a tour de force of Cockney classicism coupled with a neo-Juvenalian satire which ends by ‘conceiving’ Gifford poetically, out of a long-fermented loam of ‘disgust’. Hunt had two preoccupations that surfaced almost every time he addressed the subjects of Gifford and the Quarterly. The first was the fact that he had been asked in 1809 by John Murray to contribute to the Quarterly, then starting up.8 Hunt refused because his political stance differed, a circumstance that he publicised—perhaps a little too much—to emphasise his own independence. Hunt’s other preoccupation was with what he claimed was the source of his ‘disgust’ at Gifford: Gifford’s attack in The Baviad (1791) on the famous actress and poet Mary Robinson, formerly the mistress of the Prince of Wales, and, as ‘Laura Maria’, one of the Delia Cruscans who contributed to The World (see Figure 8).9 Hunt’s defence of Robinson makes an important political point, contrasting his own feminism with Gifford’s mistreatment of women and implicitly endorsing Robinson’s liberal political opinions. But, as with his tendency to dwell on Murray’s invitation to write for the Quarterly, his repeated references to Gifford’s insult risked wearing out persuasiveness. Hunt’s recourse to the Mary Robinson episode, protracted over many years, was determined by a sense of personal incapacity as much as by strategic or ideological considerations. While he prided himself on having ‘never retaliated’ to personal attacks (see Autobiography, II: pp. 99–100), Hunt did further his own arguments while ostensibly responding on another’s behalf. The reappearance of Mary Robinson in connection with Gifford became the more striking in that she had been dead since 1800, yet Hunt still needed to invoke her to legitimate his own side of the quarrel. The earliest version of The Feast of the Poets, with its relatively mild attack on Gifford, hints that Hunt and his Tory opponents can speak the same

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8 Mary Robinson. Frontispiece to The Poetical Works of the Late Mary Robinson (London, 1824). By courtesy of St Andrews University Library.

language.10 While, according to Hunt’s own Preface to the 1814 edition, The Feast of the Poets takes its place in a specialised genre in which Apollo is shown choosing the best poets, his Feast brings out some of the similarities between satirical portraiture (or caricature) and the personal attacks which regularly featured in contemporary reviews. Furthermore, Apollo’s selection of ‘genuine’ poets places Hunt (as the poem’s author) in the position of a literary and cultural critic, while the Feast also attempts to discriminate between his own role as a poet and Gifford’s as a reviewer (a discrimination which is complicated by Gifford’s earlier career as a satirist). Disentangling himself from Gifford proved a harder task than Hunt realised. Gifford is introduced as a ‘sour little gentleman’ (l. 135) who presents himself as a would-be guest at Apollo’s banquet. After a few appropriately querulous remarks about ‘Scotch reviews’ (l. 141) and ‘reformers, and stuff’ (l. 142), he has to remind ‘the God’ (l. 5) of his identity: ‘William Gifford’s a name, I think, pretty well known!’ (l. 147). An amused Apollo insists that Gifford is first and foremost a reviewer rather than a scholar, translator or poet:

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Ah! now I remember, said Phoebus, ah true My thanks to that name are undoubtedly due; The rod, that got rid of the Cruscas and Lauras— That plague of the butterflies—sav’d me the horrors; The Juvenal, too, stops a gap in one’s shelf, At least in what Dryden has not done himself; And there’s something, which even distaste must respect In the self-taught example, that conquer’d neglect: But not to insist on the recommendations Of modesty, wit, and a small stock of patience, My visit just now is to poets alone, And not to small critics, however well known. (ll. 148–59) Hunt makes the point that ‘however well known’ Gifford may have been as an anti-Jacobin satirist, he is professionally (as well as physically) ‘small’ now that he has dwindled into a Quarterly reviewer. The dismissiveness of the passage is moderated by references to Gifford’s competence as Juvenalian satirist, and there is mention of ‘respect’ for Gifford’s struggle to achieve an education, a struggle which Gifford had described in a note prefixed to his translation of Juvenal.11 Yet, at the same time, in holding up Gifford as its only example of that despised race, the reviewers, the poem initiates Hunt’s career-long tendency to single-out Gifford for negative comment and, in doing so, to adopt his opponent’s own tone. While some of the passage offers grudging praise, the line about Gifford lacking wit, modesty and patience has a sarcastic ring not very different from the patronising style favoured by Gifford himself and his fellow Quarterly reviewers. Hunt’s prose discussion of Gifford in the 1814 edition of the Feast establishes the terms for his later attacks and does so in a style that resembles the one Gifford helped fashion for the Quarterly: a style described by one reviewer of the Feast as a mixture of ‘asperity and personality’.12 Although this note on Gifford is one of the harshest in the volume, it is not the kind of ad hominem attack that supplies personal or biographical information to discredit Gifford (rather the reverse). Nevertheless, Hunt insists that Gifford’s intolerance as a writer is inseparable from his nastiness as a person. Hunt begins by expressing ‘respect’ for Gifford’s ‘sense’ and ‘acquired talents’, and even contends that Gifford’s own account of his ‘early difficulties’ might inspire ‘regard’ (p. 58). ‘But’, continues Hunt (and it is quite a ‘but’), ‘a vile, peevish temper…breaks out in every page of his criticism, and only renders his affected grinning the more obnoxious’ (p. 58). The young satirist dismisses Gifford’s Epistle to Peter Pindar (1800) as ‘nauseous’ and finds in his other work ‘pert cant and snip-snap’ (p. 58; ‘snip-snap’ is smart repartee). Worse, in Gifford’s ‘indignation’ Hunt identifies a class and gender bias: ‘from a wrathful, personal satirist of vice and folly, he has softened and settled

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himself into an editor of old dramatists and government reviews, who is only wrathful in speaking of the objectors to princely vices, and only personal upon dead men or respectable ladies’ (p. 59). Since Hunt himself was such a well-known objector to princely vices, he evidently believed himself a likely target for Gifford’s ‘wrath’ (even though, at this time, Gifford had not yet attacked him). Hunt goes on to denounce Gifford’s tendency to ignore what the Quarterly calls ‘the imputed weaknesses of the great’,13 and his attitude towards women. Hunt provides a list of examples, extending from Gifford’s slavish admiration for the Prince Regent to his various attacks on female writers. He offers his most specific example at the beginning of a scathing 149-word sentence: ‘Princes might formerly have kept mistresses; they might also have discarded them; and these discarded mistresses, if they sinned in rhyme, might be denounced accordingly, even to their rheumatism and their crutches;—but no such things are done now’ (p. 60). Hunt explains the reference to rheumatism and crutches in a footnote: ‘See a pleasant and manly fling at Mrs Robinson’s “crutches” in the Baviad’ (p. 60). The sentence continues with another passing mention of Gifford’s attack on Mary Robinson: ‘there were vices at court formerly,—vices in Juvenal’s time,—vices even in our own time, when bad poets were going and ladies fell lame,—but now, talk of no such thing’ (p. 60). The indignant tone of these first references to Gifford’s ‘fling’ at Robinson indicates anger at her treatment, but, given that the incident became central to Hunt’s campaign against Gifford, these early mentions are surprisingly brief. Later references to Gifford’s treatment of Robinson help to justify the unusually bitter tone of Hunt’s remarks; as in Hunt’s defences of Keats and Shelley, he dwells upon the supposed weaknesses of a victim to bolster his own position.14 Hunt uses the Mary Robinson insult to proclaim his own moral authority—but one could argue that he acquires this only through contrast with the less than ‘manly’ Gifford, and at the expense of the persecuted woman (who is literally, as well as figuratively, weak: physically incapacitated, as well as ‘fallen’). The Feast of the Poets provoked a flurry of reviews, some hostile and some supportive, but the Quarterly did not notice Hunt until 1816 when he published The Story of Rimini. Since John Murray was the publisher one might have expected the Quarterly, published from the same house, to treat the poem kindly; the fact that it did not illustrates the less than straightforward relationship in the period between reception, politics and aesthetic judgment.15 Gifford co-authored the review of Rimini with John Wilson Croker, who would go on to ‘cut up’ Keats’s Endymion (1818). Hunt’s Autobiography suggested that the Quarterly attacked Rimini as retribution for the Feast, adding, ‘it would have met with no such hostility, or indeed any hostility at all, if politics had not judged it’ (Autobiography, II: pp. 172–3). Politics undoubtedly influenced the Quarterly’s attack, but Hunt’s claim seems overly narrow given the experimentalism of the poem. In Rimini Hunt challenged the conservative ideology and eighteenth-century

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aesthetics of the reviewers, and, to an extent, courted their hostility. Gifford and Croker express overt class snobbery (Hunt has ‘the vulgar impatience of a low man’), but most of their energy in this carefully written article is devoted to ridiculing the ‘pretended principles’ and practice of Hunt’s ‘new theory’, his ‘inaccurate, negligent, and harsh versification’ and his ‘ungrammatical, unauthorised, chaotic jargon’. Although these remarks on Hunt’s language may be seen as politically motivated, the reviewers seem to have been content to exploit Rimini primarily for entertainment.16 Gifford’s and Croker’s game-playing can most clearly be seen in their calculatedly disingenuous opening: as Donald Reiman points out, they ‘establish the tone by pretending not to know who Hunt is—though he was a national celebrity’.17 After a dismissive reference to Hunt’s editorship of the Examiner (which the writers airily refuse to name), the passage continues: A considerable part of this poem was written in Newgate, where the author was some time confined, we believe for a libel which appeared in a newspaper, of which he is said to be the conductor. Such an introduction is not calculated to make a very favourable impression. Fortunately, however, we are as little prejudiced as possible on this subject: we have never seen Mr. Hunt’s newspaper; we have never heard any particulars of his offence; nor should we have known that he had been imprisoned but for his own confession. We have not, indeed, ever read one line that he has written, and are alike remote from the knowledge of his errors or the influence of his private character. We are to judge him solely from the work now before us. (Quarterly Review, XIV ( January 1816), p. 473) Claiming to be ‘as little prejudiced as possible’ was a sly allusion to the ‘unprejudiced’ principles Hunt had announced in his ‘Prospectus’ to the Examiner; the sense of Olympian condescension is apparent, too, in mistaking Newgate for Horsemonger Lane Gaol where Hunt had actually been imprisoned. Yet, although Hunt described it as an expression of ‘blind fury’ (E (26 September 1819), p. 620), this article did not descend to ‘personality’ and Hunt’s private life. Except for a final reference about Hunt’s ‘wretched vanity’ the review principally consists of criticism of Hunt’s Cockney style. In this kind of criticism, which wasn’t only to be found in the Quarterly, the reviewers paraded choice specimens of Hunt’s ‘faulty’ diction and syntax. Subsequent issues of the Quarterly made jibes at ‘Mr. Examiner Hunt’ in articles on the evils of the radical press,18 but the next sustained attack on Hunt relied more on laboured witticisms about Hunt himself. In the review of Hunt’s and Hazlitt’s The Round Table (1817), the writer—probably John Taylor Coleridge or James Russell, though it may have been Gifford— claimed that the book’s political messages were what ‘chiefly excited us to

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take the trouble of noticing the work’. Accordingly, Hazlitt’s critique of Edmund Burke is dismissed as ‘loathsome trash’, ‘slime’, ‘filth’. Hunt’s share of the collection, however, has a less insidious aspect: Mr. Hunt sustains the part of the droll or merry fellow in the performance: it is he who entertains us with the account of his getting the night-mare by eating veal-pye, and who invents for that disorder the facetious name of Mnpvtglnau-auw-auww; who takes the trouble to inform us that he dislikes cats; to describe ‘the skilful spat of the finger nails which he gives his newspaper’, and the mode in which he stirs his fire: it is he who devotes ten or twelve pages to the dissertation on ‘washerwomen’, and who repeats, no doubt from faithful memory, the dialogues which pass between Betty and Molly, the maid-servants, when they are first called in the morning, and describes, from actual observation, (or, it may be, experience,) the ‘conclusive digs in the side’ with which Molly is accustomed to dispel the lingering slumbers of her bed-fellow.19 While the class-based disdain in this passage has a political edge, the reviewer is mainly concerned to give a patronising summary of Hunt’s familiar essays. 20 The idea that the Quarterly’s readers (‘us’) could be ‘entertain [ed]’ by the trivialities of day-to-day Cockney living is scorned; readers are expected to appreciate the absurdity of these accumulated details and the sexual innuendo which supplements them. So, like Blackwood’s, the Quarterly belittles Hunt by exploiting his own self-representations, a strategy which suggests nevertheless that Hunt was a figure who compelled fascination as much as contempt. The Quarterly’s only other full-scale attack during Gifford’s lifetime was John Taylor Coleridge’s review of Foliage. Of particular interest in this review is the use made of Z’s techniques. Coleridge saw Hunt as the ‘author of a dangerous moral tenet’, and took him seriously as an Epicurean thinker while also exploiting the now-familiar idea of ‘the Arcadian Hunt’ lampooned in Blackwood’s.21 Like Z, Coleridge made fun of Hunt’s ‘rural retreat at Hampstead’; likewise, his slurs on Hunt’s social status and sexuality repeated Z’s insults: one of Hunt’s poems is ‘just what might have been expected from a pert, forward boarding-school girl in her seventh or eighth year’, and Hunt is said to ‘pant with womanish impatience for immediate notoriety’. Following Blackwood’s, the Quarterly attempts to diminish Hunt (a man of ‘a namby-pamby disposition’), implying that he is beneath serious consideration even while the review builds (via an attack on Shelley) to a climax of condemnation: ‘he will live and die unhonoured in his own generation, and, for his own sake it is to be hoped, moulder unknown in those which are to follow’.22 Hunt, like Hazlitt, blamed Gifford for the Round Table article and the review of Foliage. Hazlitt published in the Examiner his scathing reply ‘The

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Editor of the Quarterly Review’ (E (14 June 1818), pp. 378–9), which was later expanded into his virulent Letter to William Gifford, Esq., published in March 1819. Reviewing Hazlitt’s Letter, Hunt accused Gifford of ‘malignant cunning’ (E (14 March 1819), pp. 171–3, at p. 172), but he actually took little public notice of the Foliage article.23 That it rankled, however, is suggested by various references and allusions to the Quarterly and to Gifford. In summer 1818 he told Percy and Mary Shelley, ‘I have noticed [Gifford] only in passing, truly & unaffectedly feeling too much scorn, as you may imagine; but I think I shall say something further after all, as far as others are concerned, whose contempt perhaps is not close at hand enough to be so effective’ (SC, VI: p. 612). This is intriguing, not least because we see Hunt’s impulse to retaliate characteristically ‘exempted’ himself, becoming the more ‘effective’ for mediating his own ‘contempt’ on behalf of ‘others’ (remember Mary Robinson, and Hunt’s sense of finding in the defence of others a ‘compelling support’).24 Hunt also brought up the Foliage article in a complicated letter to the Shelleys, 12 November 1818, indicating his awareness of the drawbacks of reprisal even while conceding the temptation to retaliate: They have now been abusing Keats at a f [ ] rious rate, ever since their abuse of Shelley; & it [ ] pleasant, on many accounts beyond the eyesight of such misereble [sic] half-witted critics, to see how the public disgust is increasing against them every day. I made no answer to Gifford myself, partly out of contempt, partly (I must really say) out of something bordering on a loathing kind of pity, & partly for the sake of setting an example always praised but seldom or never practiced. I therefore instinctively paid a a [sic] friend like Shelley the compliment of feeling for him as I felt for myself;—but there are limits in forbearance, especially where the task is not one of self-revenge but of friendship; & as they have sent for his poem from Ollier’s to criticise it, I mean, if they (Gifford or others) do not take warning, to buckle on my old rusty resentments, & give them such a carbonado as I know I am able to give, & they most capable of feeling. (SC, VI: 740)25 Hunt refers to the negative review of Keats’s Endymion which appeared in the April 1818 issue of the Quarterly (actually published in September of that year). The ‘abuse of Shelley’ alludes to the attack on Shelley in the Foliage review, and Hunt correctly assumed that the Quarterly would assail Shelley’s ‘poem from Ollier’s’, Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam (1818) in a forthcoming issue. The claim that ‘the public disgust is increasing against them every day’ sounds like wishful thinking. While identifying closely with Shelley (‘feeling for him as I felt for myself’), Hunt’s ‘contempt’ and his ‘loathing kind of pity’ also indicates an emotional engagement with the despised reviewer—an engagement neatly focused by the repetitions in the

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concluding sentence: ‘give them such a carbonado as I know I am able to give, & they most capable of feeling’. Haunting this sentence is another: ‘give them such a carbonado as I know I am capable of feeling, & they most able to give’. Hunt goes back and forth in this passage, paying Shelley the ‘compliment’ of ‘feeling for him’ while declining to speak back, and priding himself on issuing a ‘carbonado’ that, he knows from his own experience, will hit home. The claim, ‘there are limits in forbearance’, suggests that to reply on behalf of a friend is ethically superior to ‘selfrevenge’—but that Hunt does not rule out ‘selfrevenge’ entirely. The various reprisals that Hunt went on to publish in the Examiner relied extensively on ‘old rusty resentments’, for example in his response to the Quarterly’s review of Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam. The review treats Shelley harshly, but at one point compares him favourably to ‘his friend and leader Mr Hunt’ (Quarterly Review, XXI (April 1819), pp. 460–71, at p. 469; published September 1819). Hunt, as we have seen, had ‘friendship’ to compel and justify a reply, and ‘The Quarterly Review, and Revolt of Islam’ duly appeared in three instalments in the Examiner in late September and early October 1819. The reply engages closely with the Quarterly’s article—so closely, indeed, as to seem dictated by it. Although Hunt asserts that ‘[w]e are not going to nauseate the reader with all the half-sighted and whole-clawed meanness of the article in question’ (E (26 September 1819), p. 621), he quotes at length from John Taylor Coleridge’s strictures on Shelley’s poem. Despite following the reviewer’s lead in singlingout individuals for attack, Hunt does not take for granted that Gifford wrote the review: he berates the Quarterly’s editor alongside other Quarterly reviewers, Croker and George Canning, while reserving his sharpest barbs for Gifford. He twice brings up his ‘old resentment’ at Gifford’s attack on Mary Robinson, reinvigorating his battle on Shelley’s behalf by identifying another instance of ‘something at stake’ which would lend his own endeavour ‘support’.26 The first allusion is relatively oblique, Gifford ‘has licked the feet of petty [princes], and thrown stones at their discarded mistresses’ crutches’ (E (26 September 1819), p. 621), the second more explicit: Hunt responds to the Quarterly’s diatribe against Shelley’s anti-Christian stance by questioning the Christianity of various reviewers, including Gifford: ‘Was Mr. Gifford a worthy follower of him who was the forgiver and friend of Mary Magdalen, when he ridiculed the very lameness and crutches of a Prince’s discarded mistress!’ (E (3 October 1819), p. 636). This was far from being the last time that Hunt brought up this incident for, as we’ve seen, it had become a signature of his moral authority. Neither Gifford nor any other Quarterly reviewer responded, and at times the ‘war’ seemed distinctly one-sided. The Quarterly did, however, continue to attack Hunt’s fellow reformist writers, reviewing William Hone’s Apocryphal New Testament in July 1821 and Hazlitt’s Table Talk and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in October 1821. A series of counterattacks followed in

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the Examiner in 1822. Two unsigned short pieces appeared in January, as did a lead article, signed Q (Albany Fonblanque or perhaps John Hunt?). None of these were by Leigh Hunt, who by now had set out for Italy to collaborate with Byron and Shelley on The Liberal. But, despite the absence of Hunt’s familiar ‘indicator’ signature, they kept alive the feud between the Examiner’s former editor and his assailant. The earliest of these articles, ‘The Three Asses.—Wm. Gifford’, made the first public reference to Murray’s invitation for Hunt ‘to bray in the Quarterly,27 and found another cause for that journal’s animosity in the ‘divers sounds’ of The Feast of the Poets. The article provides a long quotation from the 1814 Feast, including Hunt’s attack on Gifford together with its long accompanying note complete with the reference to Mary Robinson’s rheumatism and her crutches. Although this article was apparently not written by Leigh Hunt, it perpetuated his strategy of harking back to that formative resentment to substantiate the ongoing argument against Gifford. The lead article in the Examiner (20 January 1822), continued the assault, mentioning once again that ‘it was only [Hunt’s] own squeamishness which prevented him from becoming one of the learned band of Thebans [in the Quarterly] at his own price’ (E (20 January 1822), p. 34). Later that year Hunt, writing from Devon on his way to Italy, published a series of ‘Letters to the Readers of the Examiner’ several of which address the same number of the Quarterly at some length. The third letter tackles the Quarterly for its treatment of Keats and Hazlitt, and concludes by commenting that as ‘Mr. Shelley, being a great infidel, is not fond of revenging himself Hunt will ‘say…a few words in his stead’ (E (9 June 1822), p. 357). The fourth and fifth letters contain a rebuttal of the Quarterly’s attack on Prometheus Unbound; and the sixth, which also berates the Quarterly, is a review of Shelley’s Adonais. By the time Hunt’s final Examiner ‘Letter’ on Shelley appeared, he was in Italy preparing to start work on The Liberal. The Liberal can be seen as an attempt to forge a reformist counterblast to the Quarterly on its own ground— an upmarket, quarterly periodical, to complement the Examiner’s weekly newspaper format.28 Although the journal was short-lived, the amount of hostile publicity provoked by the first number of The Liberal could be seen as an achievement in itself. However, that outcry had more to do with the reception of Byron, who was seen as tainted by his association with the Cockney School; when the reviewers defended Byron at Hunt’s expense, their strictures upon Hunt tended to run along lines already laid down by the Blackwood’s writers. One of the attacks on Hunt was in The Illiberal! Verse and Prose from the North!!, a pamphlet of late 1822. Although Thomas J.Wise stated a century later that it ‘was written by William Gifford’, no evidence has been found for this claim.29 If it is true, the content of The Illiberal! would suggest that Gifford’s attitude to Hunt was now influenced by the Blackwood’s campaign against the Cockneys, torn between the imperative to condemn Hunt and the impulse to lampoon his various activities.

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The text of The Illiberal! consists of a brief play set in Pisa and acted out by Mr. H—T, ‘Versifier’ (p. 219) and his collaborator the lofty Lord B——N, who derides him as ‘that damn’d Sonnetteer’ (p. 220). Lord B——N dreams about the ghost of ‘SHELLY’ [sic] and receives a letter from him in hell advising him to repent his irreligion. The Illiberal! sets out an account of the doomed collaboration in a way that, from this time onwards (for example in Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron of 1824) always reflected badly on Hunt and his family. Hunt’s children appear in the play as ‘THE LITTLE AITCHES’, ‘Imported from the Land of Cockney, as Assistant Scribblers to the Liberal’ (p. 219). The author plays the Quarterly’s game of pretending that Hunt’s poems were actually written by his children (the Quarterly had suggested that lines in Foliage had been ‘dictated’ by Hunt’s son ‘master Dick’; see Quarterly Review, XVIII ( January 1818), p. 332). In January 1824 Blackwood’s followed suit, joking that UltraCrepidarius was written by Dick’s older brother John, and then insisting that it was written by Hunt’s (nonexistent) 96-year-old grandfather. Yet compared to the paragon of vulgarity in the Blackwood’s attacks, ‘Mr. H—T’ in The Illiberal! comes across as a relatively dignified figure. Hunt probably neither saw The Illiberal! nor suspected its author to be Gifford. That Gifford was not far from his thoughts during his stay in Italy, however, is confirmed by a satirical poem that he published anonymously in the third number of The Liberal, ‘To a Spider Running across a Room’ (1823). The animosity of this piece may respond to reviews of The Liberal rather than a fresh grudge against Gifford (the Quarterly did not review The Liberal). The speaker of the poem hesitates whether or not to kill a disgusting insect, pointing out that ‘The vagrant never injured me or mine,/Wrote no critiques, stabb’d at no heart divine’ (The Liberal III: p. 178)—presumably a reference to the Quarterly’s attacks on Shelley or, possibly, Keats. He contrasts the relatively harmless spider with Southey and other venomous reviewers, including ‘the brisk crowers in Scotch magazines’; since they are lower than ‘vermin’ and he has ‘spared’ them (The Liberal III: pp. 178–91), why should he smash the spider? One passage of the poem applies the same argument to a ‘dog’, who is clearly Gifford: Have I, these five years, spared the dog a stick, Cut for his special use, and reasonably thick, Now, because prose had fell’d him just before; Then, to oblige the very heart he tore; Then, from conniving to suppose him human, Two-legged, and one that had a serving-woman; Then, because some one saw him in a shiver, Which shewed, if not a heart, he had a liver; And then, because they said the dog was dying, His very symptoms being given to lying? (The Liberal III: p. 179)

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The ‘stick’ withheld for ‘five years’ refers to Ultra-Crepidarius, and the passage wittily gives several reasons for withholding it from publication: the ‘prose’ which ‘fell’d’ Gifford may be Hazlitt’s Letter; the ‘very heart he tore’ is Shelley; Gifford addressed several poems to his ‘serving-woman’, one of which Hunt admired. Following this trailer, Ultra-Crepidarius was published towards the end of 1823. Hunt had drafted Ultra-Crepidarius back in 1818, in response to the Quarterly’s attack on Foliage, but refrained from publishing it then because, he explains in the Preface, he is ‘deficient’ as a ‘“hater”’.30 We’ve seen already how Hunt liked to compensate for that deficiency by finding ‘something at stake’ concerning friends or some other cause or issue. Taken altogether, the poem is also a tour de force of a peculiarly Huntian kind in that it presents a catalogue of things ‘at stake’ by way of identifying—or, rather, creating—its target. In this way Ultra-Crepidarius transforms Hunt’s deficiency to imaginative gain. Ultra-Crepidarius consists of a Cockney-Greek myth followed by a searing excoriation of Gifford in the manner of Juvenal. The title of the poem (possibly invented by Charles Lamb, and not explained by Hunt) plays on the fact that Gifford had been in his youth an apprentice shoemaker. The label ‘ultra-crepidarius’ ridicules the Tory editor for constituting the essence of a shoemaker—the poem’s premise is that Gifford is as lowly as the ‘soul of a shoe’ (l. 188)—while mocking him for presuming to look higher.31 Hunt’s Preface to Ultra-Crepidarius, written in 1823, proceeds across familiar terrain, alluding to the ‘Spider’ poem in the third Liberal with its reference to a ‘stick’ unused for five years. Hunt mentions Gifford’s ‘ill temper’, ‘malignity’ and ‘mediocre pretensions’ (p. iii)—the same charges made in the note on Gifford in the 1814 Feast of the Poets. The Preface goes on to give an account of Hunt’s relationship with Gifford, and this, too, runs along predictable lines: It is said I attacked him first. It is not true. He attacked a woman. He struck, in her latter days, at the crutches of poor Mary Robinson—a human being, who was twenty times as good as himself, and whose very lameness (that last melancholy contradiction to qualities of heart and person which he might well envy) was owing to a spirit of active kindness which he never possessed. The blow was bound to make every manly cheek tingle; and I held up the little servile phoenomenon in the ‘Feast of the Poets’. For this, and for attacking powerful Princes instead of their discarded Mistresses, he h,as never forgiven me. My first notice of him was in his praise: to which, if I mistake not, I owe the importunate requests which Mr. Murray made me to write in the Quarterly Review. (pp. iii–iv) Here again are references to Mary Robinson, and Hunt’s mention of ‘Mr. Murray’ also returns to familiar preoccupations. Hunt concludes the Preface

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by offering a ‘word’ (p. v) on Gifford’s humble beginnings: for Hunt, Gifford’s lower-class background makes his sycophantic attitude towards royalty and aristocracy all the more contemptible, and this is an aspect of his behaviour treated in the poem. In contrast to the familiar protestations of the Preface, the opening lines of the poem have a quirky vitality: ’Tis now about fifty or sixty years since, (The date of a charming old boy of a Prince) Since the feather’d god Mercury happen’d to lose A thing no less precious than one of his shoes. (ll. 1–4) Hunt presents an irreverent rewriting and updating of Greek myth, a technique encapsulated by the emphasis on both divine and human footwear. This opening pulls Mercury down to earth and locates him in a particular historical context—the beginning of the reign of George III. The poem begins with the god Mercury in bed with Venus, complaining about having lost one of his winged shoes. It turns out that Venus, planning to get a pair made for herself, has sent the shoe away to be copied—its earthly destination being Ashburton, Devon, the birthplace of William Gifford. Venus accompanies Mercury to Ashburton, and the arrival of the celestial lovers makes everyone more affectionate except for ‘one Shoe’ (l. 86) which is not Mercury’s lost sandal, but a grouchy item ‘deaf and blind to all beautiful things’ (l. 110). Continuing the juxtaposition of the celestial and the earthly, an elaborate account of the wonders of Mercury’s feathered sandals contrasts with a reference to the shoe that represents Gifford, described as ‘screaming weak like a leather-toed bat’ (l. 137). In creating a narrative around the (evidently post-coital) quest for a missing shoe, Hunt flaunts his assigned role as a spoiler of the classics. One could argue that Cockney poetry always has a knowing self-parodic element, and in this poem the self-parody is positively gleeful. Hunt clearly takes pleasure in the coy eroticism and modish treatment of the classics that had characterised Rimini and Foliage: ‘I wonder’, said Mercury,—putting his head One rosy-fac’d morning from Venus’s bed,— ‘I wonder, my dear Cytherea,—don’t you?— What can have become of that rogue of a shoe’. (ll. 15–18) These lines exemplify Hunt’s breezy, self-mocking playfulness: camp, colloquial, and with a hint of erotic titillation, the scene is one of the most brilliant examples of Cockney classicism:

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[T] he God put a leg out of bed, And summon’d his winged cap on to his head; And the widow in question flew smack round his foot, And up he was going to end his pursuit, When Venus said softly (so softly, that he Turn’d about on his elbow)—‘What! go without me?’ (ll. 37–42) The references to Mercury’s leg, foot and elbow (which irritated the reviewer at Blackwood’s) recall the overt physicality of Hunt’s ‘The Nymphs’ (discussed in this volume by Jeffrey Cox, see p. 71).32 And the idea of Mercury’s shoe as ‘the widow in question’ (meaning, presumably, bereft of its ‘roguish’ partner) is of a piece with this bizarre, offbeat scene. Setting out for Gifford’s Ashburton, Mercury and Venus ‘chalk’d out their journey, got up, [and] took their nectar’ (l. 66)—a substitute for a morning cup of tea.33 Hunt’s enjoyment and command of narrative comes over in a lively domestic dialogue between the ‘amused’ god and goddess (l. 116) and the bad-tempered shoe, who does not know their identities: ‘ “Here,” ’ says Venus, ‘“come kiss my foot, as a proof we agree:”/But the Shoe huff’d,—as who should say, “Don’t talk to me” ’ (ll. 94–5). In their review of Rimini Gifford and Croker had italicised rhyme words to ridicule them (‘upon it’ and ‘bonnet’, for example, Quarterly Review, XIV (1816), p. 475), and the Black-wood’s attacks had followed suit. In UltraCrepidarius Hunt takes evident pleasure in the colloquial style that had provoked reviewers, rhyming—as Byron had done—on proper names: ‘please a’/‘Eloisa’ (ll. 43–4), ‘flurry’/‘Murray’ (ll. 213–14) and ‘fifer’d’/ ‘Gifford’ (ll. 287–8). Other rhymes flaunt their looseness: ‘qualities’/‘small it is’ (ll. 90–1); ‘lady’/‘“Hey-day!”’ (ll. 124–5); ‘penchants’/‘ancients’ (ll. 203–4). Gifford and Croker had also attacked Hunt for his versification, and in Ultra-Crepidarius, as in earlier poems, Hunt is not restricted by the demands of metre. Both rhyme and rhythm in the following couplet, which refers to the arrival of Mercury’s shoe in Gifford’s native town, draw attention to themselves: Till it came to Ashburton, where something so odd /Seem’d to strike it, it could not help saying, “My God!”’ (ll. 57–8). These two lines epitomise the oddity and dash of the poem as a whole, as does the description of Mercury travelling ‘with such fine overlooking of face’ (1. 72). The phrase recalls a ‘Cockneyism’ from Rimini that irked at least one reviewer: ‘So lightsomely dropt in his lordly back’ (see BM (November 1817), p. 198). The British Critic disparaged the notion of ‘a fine overlooking of face’, referring to it as ‘an expression which we leave to the interpretation of our readers, suggesting in the way of conjecture that it may mean that he neglected to wash it’ ( June 1824, p. 651). Ultra-Crepidarius invites exactly this kind of patronising dismissiveness, and relishes doing so. The first half of the poem is upbeat, happily undeterred by the reviewers’ disapproval; the second consists of Mercury’s vehement denunciation of the

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‘vile shoe’. In places this emulates Pope’s description of Sporus in the ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’: Gifford will be ‘A thing made for dirty ways, hollow at heart’ (l. 159). Mercury also attacks the Quarterly in couplets which—despite the use of anapaestics rather than iambics—approach the trenchancy of Pope’s attacks on bad writers in the Dunciad: Misquote, and misplace, and mislead, and misstate, Misapply, misinterpret, misreckon, misdate, Misinform, misconjecture, misargue; in short, Miss all that is good, that ye miss not the Court. (ll. 231–4) Mercury’s speech concludes with a reference to the celebrated affair between the Prince of Wales and Mary Robinson. For years this had been a rallyingpoint for Hunt’s journalism, as we’ve seen throughout this chapter. But instead of diminishing Gifford by overtly castigating his treatment of Robinson (Hunt’s method up to now), the poem touches upon the matter obliquely and at this point, like the toad revealed as Satan by Ithuriel’s spear (Paradise Lost, IV: 810–14), the ‘vile shoe’ struggles ‘up into man’: ‘It slunk out of doors, and men called the thing GIFFORD’ (ll. 278–88). Transposed into poetry, Hunt’s ‘disgust’ becomes in the satirical world of UltraCrepidarius a creative release from the sense of deficiency which had entangled Hunt as much as his encounter with Gifford and the Quarterly. But the feud between Hunt and Gifford and Hunt and the Quarterly did not end with Ultra-Crepidarius; just before he died, Gifford slighted Hunt as a ‘maitre ane’ in the Preface to his edition of John Ford (1826).34 Another attack on Hunt in the Quarterly was still to come, two years after Gifford’s death: Lockhart’s damning review of Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828): ‘the miserable book of a miserable man’ (Quarterly Review (March 1828), pp. 402–26, at p. 403). Three years later, in his review of Thomas Moore’s Life of Lord Byron (1830), Lockhart claimed that Hunt shows ‘that it is possible to possess, in almost the total absence of every other talent, a potent one for producing deep and permanent impressions of disgust’ (Quarterly Review ( January 1831), pp. 168–226, at p. 210). This anticipates Hunt’s final estimate of Gifford: as we saw at the beginning, Hunt’s Autobiography recalls how he had ‘conceived some disgust against him as a man’, mentioning once more John Murray’s invitation to write for the Quarterly (forty years after the event!). Evidently Ultra-Crepidarius had been a spirited aberration, but does this mean that Hunt’s life-long hatred of Gifford was, ultimately, irrational? I don’t want to dismiss the possibility that Hunt’s attitude was in some sense inexplicable, but the quarrel was also determined by the conditions of literary warfare. Hunt himself draws attention to a change in such matters when he writes, in 1850, ‘[r]eaders in these kindlier days of criticism have no conception of the extent to which personal hostility allowed itself to be

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transported, in the periodicals of those times’ (Autobiography, II: p. 99). Why, though, did Hunt’s personal disdain, or disgust, outlast the cultural situation in which it originated? I suggest that Hunt’s enduring contempt for Gifford reflected his uncertainty in relation to the Quarterly Review and its editor, an uncertainty which the convention of anonymity encouraged. Once Gifford started to edit the Quarterly, he became elusive, and virtually invisible to his opponent. Hunt’s response was to revive and perpetuate into the Victorian era a quarrel about one of the most celebrated poets of the previous century.35

Notes 1 Gifford may have looked at everyone he met with the same ‘countenance between the querulous and the angry’ (Autobiography, II: p. 91). Martin Aske, ‘Critical Disfiguring: The “Jealous Leer Malign” in Romantic Criticism’ in Questioning Romanticism, ed.John Beer (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 49–70, argues that the Hunt/Gifford quarrel is emblematic of a Romantic-era discourse of envy and ressentiment, but does not address why Gifford is the ‘only man’ whom Hunt continues to hate. 2 See, most recently, Cox, p. 22. In ‘The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, XLVII ( June 1992), pp. 1–31, I emphasised the quasi-literary and extemporaneous aspects of the reviewers’ rhetoric. Cox stresses that the ‘new school’ led by Hunt predated attacks on the Cockneys; an argument can also be made that Hunt was locked from the start into opposition with hostile reviewers. Hunt’s self-definition as a Cockney poet (socially and sexually marginal) cast himself in terms set by the establishment, while the reviewers approached Hunt by way of his own self-characterisations. 3 John Scott’s letter to the Morning Chronicle, 3 October 1818, points out that it ‘must be known to every one’ that Hunt and ‘the Editor of The Quarterly Review have long been at war’ (p. 4). 4 See Autobiography, I: p. 91. 5 Cf. Timothy Webb, ‘Correcting the irritability of his temper: the evolution of Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography in Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 268–90, on the discrepancy between Hunt’s ethos of ‘universal tolerance’ and the ‘adversarial asperities of the Examiner’ (p. 279). Arguing that Hunt’s ‘philosophy of good cheer’ degenerates into ‘quietism’ (pp. 287–8), Webb shows that his judgements of others soften in the Autobiography—except for his opinion of Gifford. 6 Steven E.Jones, Satire and Romanticism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 133. 7 The Quarterly’s reviewers adhered to the convention of anonymous authorship; Gifford never publicly identified himself as the writer of any review in the Quarterly. Nor did he respond, except in the Quarterly, to Hunt’s attacks on him. Hunt, by contrast, published The Feast of the Poets and Ultra-Crepidarius under his own name and wrote only semi-anonyrnously when attacking the Quarterly in the Examiner. This gives the impression that Hunt is more fascinated by Gifford and his periodical than Gifford is by him. 8 Murray’s letter to Hunt, which is apparently a second request praising his ‘talents in Dramatic Criticism’, can be found online at the ‘Quarterly Review Project’ at http://www.dreamwater.com/edu/earlyqr/. A reply by John Hunt is

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12 13 14

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16

17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24

Kim Wheatley quoted by Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and his Friends (2 vols, London: John Murray, 1891), II: p. 154. Gifford’s attack on Mary Robinson was a fixation with Hazlitt too; Hazlitt brought it up in at least two of his attacks on Gifford (Howe IX: p. 26, n. 1 and XI: p. 117). The first version, without notes, was published in Hunt’s Reflector (1811). I quote from an anonymous, and probably unauthorised, twelve-page Boston reprint of 1813, taken from the Boston Weekly Messenger of 21 May 1813. The version of the Feast in later editions of Hunt’s poetry de-emphasised the praise of Gifford: ‘Oh, now I remember’, said Phoebus:—‘oh, true:/The Anti-LaCruscan that writes the review:—/The rod, though ‘twas no such vast matter, that fell/On that plague of the butterflies, did very well’ (ll. 91–4; quoted from Thorn ton Hunt’s 1860 edition). British Critic, I (May 1814), pp. 549–51, at p. 550. Hunt footnotes the Quarterly Review ‘No. 18, p. 148’, but that number of the Quarterly does not have a p. 148. Cf. Jones, who, in Satire and Romanticism, sees the ‘defenses’ of satiric ‘victims’ in ‘the attackers’ terms’ as a wider Romantic phenomenon (p. 132). Jones calls Hunt’s defence of Robinson in his Autobiography a ‘gesture of sexist chivalry’ (p. 133). See also Hunt’s recognition that from his schooldays he had been drawn to ‘something which compels’ bravery, ‘and supports us by a sense of the necessity’, Autobiography, I: p. 92. As my chapter shows, the Gifford—Robinson incident proved a lasting example of this compulsion, or need, in Hunt. In a letter to Archibald Constable, publisher of the Edinburgh Review (19 August 1816), Hunt claimed he was unable to find a publisher for the second edition of Rimini because of the Quarterly’s attack. That Murray published Rimini did not cause him to ‘contemplate any favourable opinion from the government critics;…but I certainly did not expect that Mr. Murray, on a comparison of all the parts of his conduct to me, would have laid himself open to the suspicion of having done his best to sacrifice me to his official friends’ (Gates, p. 76). Quarterly Review, XIV ( January 1816), pp. 473–81; RR, C: II pp. 752–6. William Keach, ‘Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style’, SiR, XXV (1986), pp. 182–96, stresses the political dimension of metrical choices but cautions against the automatic lining up of ‘politics and form’ (p. 191). Donald Reiman, RR, C: II p. 752. See Robert Southey, ‘Parliamentary Reform’, Quarterly Review, XVI (October 1816), pp. 225–78, at p. 248. The Quarterly also referred to Hunt as ‘the editor of a seditious Sunday newspaper’ in its attack on Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817); Quarterly Review, XVIII ( January 1818), pp. 458–66, at p. 465. Quarterly Review, XVII (1817), p. 159. Cf. Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, ‘Killing the Cockneys: Blackwood’s Weapons of Choice Against Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats’, K-SJ, XLVII (1998), pp. 87–107, points out that Hunt’s ‘whimsies and ritualized affectations provided enough raw material to satisfy an army of satirists’ (p. 89). In the sixth Cockney School essay (a review of Foliage) Z mocked Hunt’s ‘love of the fine imagination of the Greeks’; see BM, VI (October 1819), pp. 70–6, at p. 74; reviewer’s italics. Quarterly Review, XVIII ( Jan. 1818), pp. 324–35; RR, C: II pp. 758–63. Reiman suggests that by this time Hunt had started to respond on his own behalf by writing Ultra-Crepidarius, which he chose to withhold from publication perhaps for legal reasons. See SC, VI: p. 743. See note 14.

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25 F.L.Jones’s edition of Shelley’s letters reads ‘armour’ instead of‘resentments’. See SL, II: p. 65. 26 See Autobiography, I: p. 91, and see also the parallel example cited in note 14. 27 See ‘The Three Asses.—Wm. Gifford’, E (6 January 1822) p. 4. The title echoes a reference in the Quarterly to ‘the sacrifice of Asses—Hone, Hunt, Hazlitt and others’. 28 Nicholas Roe, in JKCD, quotes a letter from Charles Ollier to William Blackwood referring to the projected Liberal as ‘the neutralizer of the Quarterly Review’ (p. 274). In Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), Hunt claims that for Byron the rivalry was more commercial than ideological: Byron had hoped for ‘Edinburgh and Quarterly returns’ (p. 51). 29 Quoted from William H. Marshall, Byron, Shelley, Hunt and ‘The Liberal’ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1960), p. 120. Quotations from The Illiberal! are taken from Marshall. 30 Hunt, Ultra-Crepidarius: A Satire on William Gifford (London: John Hunt, 1823) p. iii. Further references in parentheses. 31 Hazlitt referred to Gifford twice in his Letter as ‘an Ultra-Crepidarian critic’ (Howe IX: pp, 16, 42); he also used the phrase in his ‘Reply to “Z”’ (Howe IX: p. 9). Howe conjectures that the adjective was invented by Lamb (Howe IX: p. 251). Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 86, explains the term. One hostile reviewer complained that Hunt’s insistence that class distinctions mean nothing to him is ‘at variance with the title of [the] book’; British Critic, XXI ( June 1824), pp. 647–57, at p. 651. 32 The review of the poem in Blackwood’s disapprovingly italicised Hunt’s references to Mercury’s leg, foot, and elbow; BM, XV ( January 1824), pp. 86– 90, at p. 87. 33 Cf. the Blackwood’s review of Foliage: ‘The affable arch-angel, supping with Adam and Eve in Paradise, is nothing to the Father of Gods and Men eating muffins with the Editor of a Sunday newspaper’; BM, VI (October 1819), pp. 70–6, at p. 72. 34 Quoted from Roy Benjamin Clark, William Gifford: Tory Satirist, Critic, and Editor (New York: Russell and Russell, 1930), p. 221. 35 The editor contributed to the biographical aspects of this chapter and to my reading of Ultra-Crepidarius.

11

‘Seeing with final eyes’ Leigh Hunt, design, immortality Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

About Leigh Hunt’s religious views there is room for debate. Cosmo Monkhouse observes that throughout his life he hovered between agnosticism and atheism. The latter he never touched, preserving through life a vague but strong faith in the ultimate working of all things for good, under the guidance of a supreme and benevolent power. If we say that he had a strong belief that there was a God, and that God was good, we shall come perhaps as closely as possible to his religion and rule of life.1 Martin Priestman’s assessment is somewhat different: A notorious infidel who had been imprisoned for his radical politics, Hunt was an important figure in establishing an aesthetic that deliberately stood outside Christian frames of reference in order to explore the goals of human desire in other terms. As he expressed it in a sonnet To Percy Shelley, on the Degrading Notions of Deity’ (1818), the ‘search for the old golden age’ on which we should be engaged is directly opposed by the Christian God, who is really only a projection of human bigotry.2 The presence or absence of Shelley when Hunt discourses about religion is a factor behind these differing but equally tenable assessments, as indeed is that of Queen Victoria, who, with her power of bestowing the poet laureateship, seems to preside over the softer, less combative religious tone of the Autobiography. That Hunt played down his religious convictions in Shelley’s presence can be deduced from the letter he wrote to him after the death of his son, William, a letter that anticipates Shelley’s incredulous smiles at the ‘Christianist’ consolation it adduces. At the same time, there is, as Monkhouse suggests, his tenacious sense throughout his life, and through all the slight adjustments of his point of view, that the world is controlled by

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a ‘Beneficence’ and a personal beneficence at that—as witness the humanising pronoun in The Religion of the Heart that gracefully and ambiguously elides into an impersonal one, ‘blessed be his Beneficence, working toward its purposes’. This phrase occurs in a deistic adaptation of Compline and Evensong that forms part of The Religion of the Heart, a devotional book that, though published in 1853, none the less recycled materials from Hunt’s earlier Christianism, or Belief and Unbelief Reconciled (1832). From the nocturnal liturgy in question, we can see that Hunt regarded the closure of each day as a point of pause allowing him to search for design behind the contingencies of daily life, even though this design, given the complexity and range implied by his plural ‘purposes’, might be difficult to detect. Also, as in the Roman office and Anglican service that supplied the deep structure of his devotions, he seems to have treated the onset of evening as a rehearsal for that most finalising of all experiences, death itself: 1. 2.

Blessed be God: blessed be his Beneficence, working toward its purposes in the evening. The portion of the globe on which I live is rolling into darkness from the face of the sun.3

Precedents for such nocturnal stock-taking can be traced more immediately to the poets of the eighteenth century: the meditations that darkness nurtures in Young’s Night Thoughts, and the paradoxical éclaircissement of darkness in the Countess of Winchilsea’s ‘Nocturnal Rêverie’. Here light, in defiance of the Enlightenment values of Pope’s epitaph for Newton, becomes the agent of chaos: ‘Till Morning breaks, and All’s confus’d again’. 4 So completely does Hunt distance and depersonalise his vision as darkness falls that he seems to take up an orbital view of the planet, as if aligning himself with a providential eye ‘out there’. To see in perspective, he seems to imply, is to see with purpose. Not, of course, that being ‘out there’ necessarily guarantees the disclosure of a larger design. After all, Volney’s Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolution of Empires chose such a vantage to demonstrate an atheistic rather than a providential dispensation in the affairs of humankind: Thence, from the aerial heights, looking down on the earth, I perceived a scene altogether new. Under my feet, floating in the void, a globe like that of the moon, but less large and less luminous, presented to me one of its phases’.5 Respicefinem visions are well served by this sort of spatial recession, and no less well served by recessions in time. A few years before the appearance of The Religion of the Heart, Hunt projected a long-term perspective on life when, in The Bitter Gourd’ (1850) he remarked that ‘wise/Is but sage good, seeing with final eyes’. A terminal view of events (the implication runs) brings with it the wisdom to grasp the design inherent in them. Hunt’s epigram thus represents a late flowering of the Augustan optimism that,

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within a decade, The Origin of Species would cause to wither in many quarters. It had long been nurtured by Leibniz and his followers, and had centred on their confidence in the proper ordonnance of things: Now the truths of reason are of two kinds: the one kind is of those called the ‘Eternal Verities’, which are altogether necessary, so that the opposite implies a contradiction. Such are the truths whose necessity is logical, metaphysical or geometrical, which one cannot deny without being led into absurdities. There are others which may be called positive, because they are the laws which it pleased God to give to Nature, or because they depend upon those. We learn them either by experience, that is, a posteriori, or by reason and a priori, that is, by considerations of the fitness of things which have caused their choice. This fitness of things has also its rules and reason, but it is the free choice of God, and not a geometrical necessity, which causes preference for what is fitting and brings it into existence. Thus one may say that physical necessity is founded on moral necessity, that is on the wise one’s choice which is worthy of his wisdom; and that both of these ought to be distinguished from geometrical necessity.6 For Leibniz, posteriority is one of the two points of vantage from which positive (that is, experiential) ‘truths’ can be acknowledged—just as Hunt matches wisdom with the capacity to see with ‘final eyes’ and just as the sage Don Alfonso, in a theorematic effort to prove that ‘così fan tutte’, urges Guglielmo not to base his judgement on intermediate developments, but rather to praise the end: ‘Saldo amico, finem lauda, finem lauda’.7 The trouble with ‘final eyes’ and laudable conclusions is their temptation to rationalise the random, and to force a pattern ex post facto. For the Leibnizian optimist, teleology is something of a Rorschach blot, reconfiguring splashes and dabs as affirmations, or, just as wrongly, extrapolating causality from mere sequence—the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (assuming causality from sequence) that Voltaire so shrewdly anatomised in Candide: ‘It is proved’, [Pangloss] used to say, ‘that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything is made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose. Observe: our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles. Legs were clearly intended for breeches, and we wear them…. It follows that those who maintain that all is right talk nonsense; they ought to say that all is for the best’.8 Posteriority, like distance, lends enchantment to the view, and, reversing the perspective of causation, redefines the end of the nose (an ‘end’ doubly

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defined!) as a spectacles-supporter, or of the leg as a breechesbearer. Pope’s memorable dogmatism in An Essay on Man is never more confident and dogmatic than at the end of Book I, where a shouted finale assays, by dint of the upper case, and in despite of Hume, that impossible transition from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’: All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony, not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good: And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite, One truth is clear, ‘Whatever IS, is RIGHT.’9 However, the processes of nature, as Richard Dawkins points out, are not teleological. Looking back at things, humankind has persistently conferred pattern on events altogether lacking a finis laudabilis, the praiseworthy end that Don Alfonso celebrates in Così fan tutte: Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.10 This illusion, apparently confirmed by Newton’s having resolved physical experience into formulae, did not square so comfortably with the context of human affairs. A Radical looking at industrial England couldn’t have had any confidence in the lightness of whatever was in that particular sphere, even if Smith and Malthus might have felt it in their respective heartless ways. After all, Harriet Martineau, though more humane than they, still used one of her fables to demonstrate that ‘THE EMPLOYMENT OF ALL POWERS AND ALL MATERIALS, THE NATURAL RECOMPENSE OF ALL ACTION, AND THE CONSEQUENT ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE HAPPINESS OF THE GREATEST NUMBER, IF NOT ALL’.11 In that rider, ‘IF NOT ALL’, lay the rub, not only with regard to the unavoidable exclusion of some from the economy, but also, through ‘Godgiven’ as opposed to socially generated circumstances, of many from the pleasures of health and life. While Hunt deplored the anti-intellectual toast to the confusion of Newton, he took care, at the same time, to distance himself from the pseudoNewtonian, status-quo reductiveness of Malthus and Smith, who formulated laws of poverty and population as if they were comparable to gravity. And he also, to some extent, distanced himself from Newton. His critique of the

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latter’s imaginative failures allowed him to proclaim the superior (because more inclusive) cognitions of poetry above those of pure science: but the poet, by the privilege which he possesses of recognizing every species of truth, is aware of the merits of mathematics, of learning, of wit, of politics, and of generalship. He is great in his own art, and he is great in his appreciation of that of others.12 Such statements cleared the way for any wish-fulfilment that imagination might nurture despite evidence to the contrary, even while acknowledging the scientific irreducibility of that evidence. Hunt needed an ideological space in which to sustain his half-secular faith in the fitness of things, and he called that space ‘poetry’. He wanted above all the assurance that being (at least in its unendurable aspects—dying children, say, or great but prematurely ailing poets) could indeed, in however inscrutable a way, equate with rightness. For how else to square the inexplicable suffering of William Shelley and John Keats with his conviction of a ‘great beneficence’? Seeing ‘with final eyes’ might in retrospect find a pattern in chaos, but, more importantly, it could assert the existence of that pattern by promising redress, and even clarification, post mortem. Such a ‘solution’ to the inscrutable fact of misery was by no means new. It had, after all, long been claimed by Christianity: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’ (1 Corinthians XIII: 12). No matter how great the ideological divide between an apostle steeped in rabbinic lore and a midVictorian deist, both Paul and Hunt believed that God generates pattern, and that the teleology of that pattern renders evil extrinsic to good. And indeed, it was precisely in such points of continuity and syncretic overlap that Hunt located the essence of religion. In his view, Christianity was never more truly itself than when it unravelled its own exclusionary dogmas, and turned into a non-sectarian ‘Christianism’. He therefore had every reason to wince at a printer’s misprision of a line in ‘Apollo and the Sunbeams’, a mistake preserved in the Milford edition: and Milton’s self, Stern from the Sinai thunders, and disposed To think him [Apollo] evil, could not, but rebuked, Only to let him hear his tones of love, And find, for him and his, strange corners sweet Of flowery blame against a kindlier creed, (Dear Christianity! Most Christian creed!) When all that has been, shall be found of piece With all that is, and beauty and kindness one.

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Shortly after this poem appeared in The New Monthly Magazine, Hunt wrote to Thomas Noon Talfourd, and pointed out that In the verses entitle[d] ‘Apollo & the Sunbeams’, the strange tautology of Dear Christianity! Most Christian creed! should be Dear Christianity’s most Christian creed; i.e. the most Christian of all its creeds. Christianity thus becomes most truly itself when it casts off accretions of dogma to focus on Jesus’s moral teachings—or, to quote Hunt’s different formulation of the same position, fourteen years on, ‘Faith, some day, will all in Love be shown’. Dogma also becomes the midwife of superficial worldliness, the sort of Lebensauffassung (life’s philosophy) that lay behind the rift with Byron. Writing about his subject’s childhood in ‘Life and Letters of Madame de Sévigné’, Hunt observes that If the training was conventual, religion was predominant (unless it was rivalled by comfit and flower-making, great pastimes of the good nuns); and in the devout case, the danger was, either that the people would be frightened into bigotry, or what happened oftener, would be tired into a passion for pleasure and the world, and only stocked with a sufficient portion of fear and superstition to return to the bigotry in old age, when the passion was burnt out.13 Hunt here regards worldly wisdom as the Janus-face of bigotry, each prone to blur with the other because they exalted self above inclusive charity. No surprise, then, that he should distinguish it from true wisdom in ‘The Shewe of Faire Seeming’: Ah, luckless wordes! and luckless wight! for lo! By some new cunning of great Wisdom’s art Poor WORLDLY WISDOM by some sudden blow Was sent about, and with the hinder part Of his own head made all the gazers start: They shuddered! then laughed out; and evermore Laughed and laughed on, each from his very heart, Untill their breaths grew scant, and sides grew sore, And all the room seemed rolling in the huge uproar. For the poore wretch was nothing but a dish With a mouth over it, and two blind eyes;

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In sensual living had been all his wish, And this was all was left him of his prize. He saw not heart, ne hope, ne fields, ne skies, Ne loved or tasted aught, except his dinner, And that with tooth grown dull. He held it lies To say that old age ever was a winner Of any least thing else. God pity him a sinner! If bigotry is ideological self-love, worldly wisdom is its sensual counterpart. But, even though Hunt’s ‘Christianism’ was essentially moral and not metaphysical, he clung to one particular dogma that, however much it might have fostered exclusive bigotry in all doctrinal avatars of religion, helped him make sense of human suffering. This dogma is the immortality of the soul, which he embraced not because he wanted to mete out punishment and reward in the afterlife—the stance of Christianity, Islam, and, to a lesser extent, Judaism—but because he needed it to guarantee a long-term design in circumstances where all he could see was random injustice and undeserved suffering. His response to the death of William Shelley is typical in this regard. Whereas Shelley himself, writing about his lost son, defines his immortality as the diffusion of a once individual energy through the ‘love of living leaves and weeds’,14 Hunt is anxious to centre that energy in a self that persists beyond death: I cannot conceive, that the young intellectual spirit which sat thinking out of his eye, & seemed to comprehend so much in his smile, can perish like the house it inhabited. I do not know that a soul is born with us; but we seem, to me, to attain to a soul, some later, some earlier; & when we have got that, there is a look in our eye, a sympathy in our cheerfulness, & a yearning & grave beauty in our thoughtfulness, that seems to say—our mortal dress may fall off when it will:—our trunk & our leaves may go:—we have shot up our blossom into an immortal air. This is poetry, you will see, & not argument; but then there comes upon me another fancy, which would fain persuade me, that poetry is the argument of a higher sphere.15 To the extent that the soul or personality is a function of an elaborate and unique symphony of genes, it does indeed grow with the organism with which it is coterminous. However, Hunt couches this science avant la lettre in the traditionally optative language of faith, a language ever eager to fall back on vegetable analogues when talking of the resurrection, as Paul does in 1 Corinthians XV:36—‘Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die’. And Hunt himself acknowledges the substanceless nature of his argument by anticipating the scepticism with which Shelley and his wife

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will greet it: ‘Do you smile at me? Do you too, Marina, smile at me? Well then,—I have done some thing at any rate’. Even so, sustained by his conviction of a great beneficence (not shared by Shelley) Hunt cannot, or will not, concede the possibility of eternal oblivion for the ‘soul’, especially (one senses) a soul that has lived so little. Like Tennyson, he recoiled from the idea of individual extinction, an idea that Darwin would soon convert to incontrovertible fact. It is, after all, this distressing sense of human dispensability that haunts the tentative faith of In Memoriam, where cold observation seems always to neutralise the warmth of yearning: The wish, that of the living whole No life may fail beyond the grave, Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul? Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life.16 The doctrine that human identity persists after death was one that Hunt refused to abandon, although he readily dispensed with the other aspects of Christian mythology that, like Arnold, he found ‘frankly impossible’. A reproach that Hunt addressed to Newton is, in this regard, a reproach that could be made against himself—de se fabula: He took space to be the sensorium of the Deity (so noble a fancy could be struck out of the voluntary encounter between his intense sense of a mystery and the imagination he despised!) and yet this very fancy was but an escape from the horror of a vacuum, and a substitution of the mere consciousness of existence for the thoughts and images with which a poet would have accompanied it.17 As great a horror vacui—in Hunt’s instance, a horror of vacant death informed his contemplation of the grave, which he accordingly made a gateway to an afterlife unconditionally available to all comers, though he could jestingly imagine a gentle purgatorial redress—nothing more punishing than faint discomfiture—for the pecadilloes and prejudices of one’s earthly existence: ‘I cannot but fancy the shade of Newton blushing to reflect that, among the many things which he professed to know not, poetry was omitted, of which he knew nothing’.18 If Newton failed to supply the ‘thoughts and images with which a poet would have accompanied’ the ‘mere consciousness of existence’, Hunt was ready to do so in ‘Reflections of a Dead Body’, to which I shall now turn.

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‘Reflections of a Dead Body’ might well have derived from Haydn’s ‘Spirit’s Song’, published 1795–6 to a text by Anne Hunter, the wife of the composer’s English physician. Since we know Hunt admired Haydn, and was able to detect the indebtedness of a trio (‘Zitti, zitti, piano, piano’) from Il Barbiere di Siviglia to the Ploughman’s Song in Die Jahreszeiten (‘Schon eilet froh’), he almost certainly knew the songs as well, most especially those whose English texts would have suited them to the Vincent Novello soirées he so often attended. ‘The Spirit’s Song’, an utterance from beyond the grave, is something of an imaginative coup de thêatre: Hark! what I tell to thee, Nor sorrow o’er the tomb; My spirit wanders free, And waits till thine shall come. All pensive and alone, I see thee sit and weep, Thy head upon a stone, Where my cold ashes sleep. I watch thy speaking eyes, And mark each falling tear; I catch thy passing sighs, Ere they are lost in air.19 This spirit, clearly, has seen with ‘final eyes’, and contrasts uncomprehending human bereavement with assurance that there is life beyond the grave. Speaking quite soon after the point of death, it presents itself as a tutelary presence and observes the minutiae of grief with the aim (it would seem) of securing the consolation promised by Revelation VII:17: ‘and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes’. But even as it speaks, it remains inaudible, for the tears and sighs of the bereaved figure continue—a sense that Hunt would himself exploit in ‘Reflections’. There is, of course, nothing innovative about projecting life beyond the grave. Such projections, beatific or damnatory, recur throughout Medieval and Renaissance literature. Anne Hunter’s differs from these, however, by avoiding the judgemental separations of dogmatic faith—the separations that Hunt’s ‘Abraham and the Fire Worshipper’ would likewise reject in favour of an undoctrined love. (This poem, even though it dates from a point late in the poet’s life, and even though partly parented by the Unitarian John Forster, presents a belief that Hunt had espoused for most of his life, as witness his Autobiography: ‘[Shelley] assented warmly to an opinion which I expressed in the cathedral at Pisa, while the organ was playing, that a truly divine religion might yet be established, if charity were really made the principle of it, instead of faith’).20 Hunter also strikes out on her own to the

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extent that she gives the reader a sense of the process of death—not the formal windings-up of the ars moriendi, but rather a sense of liminal transition, even though this is more hinted at than expounded. It comes, above all, from the sense of the spirit’s recent untrammelling (‘My spirit wanders free,/And waits till thine shall come’), and its movement through an unspecified medium that doesn’t conform with the judgemental spaces of traditional theology. A precedent can be adduced in the Emperor Hadrian’s address to a soul about to leave the body, which projects its flutterings on this side of death (in contrast to Hunter’s on that). Like Hunter after him, Hadrian dispenses with the tenets of established theology, and offers us untopographised ‘loca’ instead of such maps of the underworld as that drawn by Aeneid VI: Dear fleeting, sweeting, little soul, My body’s comrade and its guest, What region now must be thy goal, Poor little wan, numb, naked soul, Unable, as of old, to jest?21 We can trace a line from Hadrian through Hunter to Hunt, for one of the first things to observe about ‘Reflections of a Dead Body’ is the way in which, to a far greater degree than either of its antecedents, it focuses the process of transcending the flesh and, through that process, of understanding life’s inequities from a point beyond the grave. Indeed the poem begins in puzzlement, as the consciousness feels its way towards new and ineffable sensations. One suspects that Hunt developed his opening apostrophes in ‘Reflections’ from the interrogations of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: SCENE.—A female sitting by a bed-side, anxiously looking at the face of her husband, just dead. The soul within the dead body soliloquizes. What change is this! What joy! What depth of rest! What suddenness of withdrawal from all pain Into all bliss? into a balm so perfect I do not even smile. I tried but now, With that breath’s end, to speak to the dear face That watches me—and lo! all in an instant, Instead of toil, and a weak, weltering tear, I am all peace, all happiness, all power, Laid on some throne in space.—Great God! I am dead (A pause.) Dear God! Thy love is perfect; thy truth known. (Another.) And he,—and they!—How simple and strange! How beautiful!

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Hunt was aware that the Grecian urn had teased Keats out of thought with the enigmatic immortality of mortal art, an enigma comparable to that of theological afterlife, as witness the Vulgate’s rendering of 1 Corinthians XIII:12: ‘Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate’ (rendered in the Authorized Version as ‘For now we see through a glass darkly’). The eternally frustrated questions in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ are a function, moreover, of his having conceived life as a labyrinth of dark passages in which ‘We see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a Mist’.22 The start of ‘Reflections’ is continuous with this kind of questioning, but Hunt gives the interrogation a different inflection. Each phrase registers as an apostrophe and as a question at the same time, a commutability established by the question mark that caps three precedent exclamation points, and which makes the transition from life to death seem both ecstatic and incredible. Hunt has taken 1 Corinthians XV:51–2 as his point of departure, but, even so, keeping to the tenets of a Christianism unshackled from dogma, he unravels the structure of that text even as he adapts it: ‘We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,/In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump’. The sectarian colour of Paul’s pronoun, the redeemed remnant ‘we’, yields in ‘Reflections’ to an experiential ‘I’, its representativeness guaranteed by the indefinite article (‘A Dead Body’) of the title. Moreover, the change that, for Paul, will transfigure the loathsomeness of the flesh (Philippians III: 21 also speaks of changing ‘our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body’) is a change not of character but of circumstance. Hunt was refreshingly carnal in his view of the world, always validating his appetites in defiance of religious ascesis, not least the ‘monkery’ of Anglican universities: If female society had not been wanting, I should have longed to reside at an university; for I have never seen trees, books, and a garden to walk in, but I saw my natural home, provided there was no “monkery” in it’.23 Thus the change experienced by the soul in ‘Reflections of a Dead Body’ centres not on the renunciation of the flesh, but rather on its perfection: it simply reverts to a former painlessness without being intrinsically altered as Paul insists it should be. That change, furthermore, proves ‘sudden’, transpiring ‘all in an instant’ in way that recalls 1 Corinthians XV:51–2, but it is also instantaneous in an altogether different sense. Hunt has deleted the Pauline hiatus between death and resurrection: no sojourn in the grave, no apocalyptic trumpets needed to release the soul into its happiness. This happiness, furthermore, anticipates the finality of the ‘final eyes’ expounded in ‘The Bitter Gourd’, for twice within the first ten lines of ‘Reflections’ the word ‘perfect’ half-activates its Latin etymology in the word ‘perficere’ (‘to complete’): ‘Dear God! thy love is perfect; thy truth known’. Again a Pauline echo reverberates in the text, for 1 Corinthians XIII: 12 promises cognition as an alternative to enigmatic groping: ‘Nunc

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cognosce ex parte; tunc autem cognoscam, sicut et cognitus sum’ (‘now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’). To stress these biblical echoes is to dwell too long, perhaps, on the derivative aspects of the poem. The reader is more immediately arrested by its ‘psychopompic’ qualities, by which I mean the effort it makes to trace the processes of death, possibly for the first time in English literature. In Hamlet, Shakespeare had availed himself of the classical topos of death as a decreating black hole, ‘unde negant redire quemquam’24 (‘whence, they say, nothing returns’), while in Measure for Measure III: 1, he had explored the VirgilianDantesque alternative, viz., hell as suffering consciousness. Even Anne Hunter, closest to Hunt in many regards, doesn’t dwell on the crossing per se, but has her spirit look back wistfully and impotently at its former partner. It is clear, therefore, that few (if any) precedents exist for the imaginative projection of mortal process, though there is perhaps just a hint of persistent consciousness post mortem in Measure for Measure: ‘To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot’ (III: 1, 120). Developing his poem from various hints in this line of thanatopses, or contemplations of death, Hunt goes a step further and tracks the act of dying in all its gradations of consciousness, something that Tennyson would later do more summarily in The Princess (‘when unto dying eyes/ The casement slowly grows a glimmering square’25), Emily Dickinson in ‘A Fly buzzed’ (‘And then the Windows failed—and then/I could not see to see—’26), and Emily Brontë, inverting the process to chart the stages of a consciousness that moves from sleep to waking, in ‘The Prisoner’: ‘O! dreadful is the check—intense the agony When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again, The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain’.27 The first stage direction of ‘Reflections’—Hunt has beaten Browning to the dramatic monologue, but without incorporating the apparatus of the theatre into the text itself—stresses that the poetic consciousness initially speaks within the corpse, and that only towards the end does the spirit untrammel itself, and withdraw from the world: ‘It speaks with a hurried vehemence of rapture’. To find a source for that ‘hurried vehemence’, we must recur to the Vincent Novello soirées, for Schubert’s ‘Ganymed’ would almost certainly have been on the programmes. This Lied, based on a pantheistic text by Goethe, quickens its pulse in a way that the words on the page don’t necessarily imply. In any event, there are imaginative, and even verbal, parallels between the coda of ‘Reflections’ and the poem in question. Compare: Up, up, lies my course. While downward the clouds Are hovering, the clouds Are bending to meet yearning love.

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For me, Within thine arms Upwards! Embraced and embracing! Upwards into thy bosom, Oh Father all-loving!28 with Oh the infinitude and the eternity! The dimpled air! the measureless conscious heaven! The endless possession! the sweet, mad, fawning planets [It speaks with a hurried vehemence of rapture. Sleeking, like necks, round the beatitudes of the ubiquitous sun-god With bee-music of innumerable organ thunders. And the travelling crowds this way, like a life-tempest, With rapid angelical faces, two in one, Ah ah! ah ha! and the stillness beyond the stars— My Friend! my Mother!—I mingle through the roar. [Spirit vanishes.} For once, perhaps, Hunt’s loose, catachretic style can be justified as a language breaking-up as it begins to pass the barrier of the ineffable. Here, in a sense, is art aspiring to music in a proto-Paterian way, though one wishes that Hunt had chosen a different expletive from ‘ah ha!’ to suggest the transition of language into rapturous noise! He gets a worthier effect from the dashes that signify an aposiopesis (or rhetorical breakingoff) into inarticulate silence, from the pleonasm of ‘the infinitude and the eternity’, and from the mystifying arithmetic of ‘two in one’ (a divine joke on the Trinity?), and from the apparent contradictions of ‘Friend’ and ‘Mother’, suggesting that all traditional categories of relationship are effaced in this ultimate one. Add to these the shifts in aural experience, from the minuscule (‘bee-music’) to the grandiose (‘organ thunders’) to the absence of sound altogether (‘silence beyond the stars’), and we are left with a sense that the experience is too large and complex to be captured in or evoked by language. Hunt’s arrival in a familial embrace (‘My Friend! my Mother!’) is borrowed from Goethe (‘Alliebender Vater’)—borrowed, and then adapted to take away the patriarchal sting, and to suggest something more polymorphous still than ‘tausendfacher Liebesswonne’, for we should note that the coda of ‘Reflections’ also seems to draw on the opening stanza of ‘Ganymed’: How, in the light of morning, Round me thou glowest, Spring, thou beloved one!

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With thousand-varying loving bliss The sacred emotions Born of thy warmth eternal Press ‘gainst my bosom, Thou endlessly fair one!29 The difference, of course, is that Goethe’s consciousness of a ‘great beneficence’ intensifies to a point of ecstasy (in the literal sense of that word). ‘Ganymed’ lacks a real shift of consciousness, even though the halfmetaphoric flight of the shepherd on the eagle’s back is implied throughout, and that itself implies a movement from earth to Olympus. If Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ offered Hunt a point of departure and adaptation, resolving questions rather than teasing an interrogator with their indeterminacy, one suspects he might also have derived some inspiration from a very different source, Herbert’s ‘Prayer (I)’. This comprises a set of appositive phrases, the very verblessness of which tries to image the repose of paradise, and Hunt might well have learned from this, since his apostrophes can also be construed as nouns and noun phrases in a beatific catena. Compare Herbert’s ‘Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse’30 with …O balm! O bliss! O saturating smile Unsmiling! O doubt ended! certainty Begun! Another Herbertian note is struck in the paraphrasing anadiplosis that superimposes equivalent phrases on each other—‘doubt ended! certainty / Begun’—to imply two different perspectives in overlap. This comes close to the phrasing of ‘Sunday’, which likewise begins as an appositive chain of noun phrases, flavoured with apostrophe: O day most calm, most bright, The fruit of this, the next world’s bud, Th’indorsement of supreme delight…31 This sort of liminality is crucial to the success of ‘Reflections’, which projects life as a sleep, rather as Prospero, in The Tempest projects humankind as ‘such stuff/As dreams are made on’ (IV:1, 156–7). It is equally crucial to the effective derangements of familiar experience, as in the oxymoronic ‘rapture of this cold’ and ‘Colder I grow, and happier’, through which Hunt tries to project a renovated consciousness, re-interpreting and transfiguring the more predictable data of the world. Just as Keats’s Apollo proclaims that ‘Knowledge enormous makes a God of me’ (Hyperion, III: 113) so Hunt invests his soul with a deific sense of pattern and purpose—‘I read it all’—and, in the process, reduces human grief to analytical and trivial ‘household

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words’, soon to be discarded for ‘th’immeasurable/Tongue of the allpossessing smile eternal’. So much, then, for the poetic forging of the pattern that Hunt had repeatedly striven to detect in the contingencies and sufferings of his own life. Crypto-Augustan optimist though Hunt was in many ways, he could not, as Thomas Malthus had done, use Leibnizian precepts to ordain social injustice; nor could he embrace the proto-Darwinian sacrifice of individual to generic survival that Tennyson reluctantly saw in the natural world. How to square beneficence with suffering, then? The answer, obviously, was to follow institutional religion, and instate an idea of recompense. The Christian Magnificat must have struck all comers as an altogether radical document, one that at no point proclaims that ‘Whatever IS, is RIGHT’. And since it was patently untrue to anybody with eyes that God had filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away, it became necessary to displace its messianic proclamations into the future—a case not so much of ‘esurientes implevit bonis’ (‘he has filled’), but rather ‘esurientes implebit bonis’ (‘he will fill’). But whereas Christianity added some fine print to the contract—the whole filtering apparatus of faith—Hunt retained immortality simply as an instrument of redress, not of credal enforcement. The reflective ‘dead body’ once suffered (to what purpose we are never told, for Hunt himself treats this as a matter of faith), but now it enjoys perfect happiness. Just as when Keats suffered, or William Shelley suffered, compensation could be guaranteed by the transference of those suffering personalities into a life post mortem where their misery would be abolished and, perhaps, explained. The ‘Reflections of a Dead Body’ was drafted, therefore, as a kind of quod erat demonstrandum for the sort of undoctrined but still irrational faith (faith being by definition irrational) that sustained Hunt throughout his life.

Notes 1 Cosmo Monkhouse, Life of Leigh Hunt (London: Walter Scott, 1893), p. 226. 2 Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 244. 3 Quoted in Blunden, p. 322. 4 Poetry of the Landscape and the Night: Two Eighteenth-Century Traditions, ed. Charles Peake (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), p. 40. 5 Constantin François Volney, A New Translation of Volney’s Ruins, intro. Robert D.Richardson (2 vols, New York: Garland Publishing, 1979), I: pp. 26–7. 6 G.W.Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 74. 7 W.A.Mozart, Così fan tutte: Dramma giocoso in due atte: Partitur, ed. Georg Schümemann and Kurt Soldan (Leipzig: Edition Peters, 1972), p. 55. 8 Voltaire, Françoise-Marie Arouet de, Candide or Optimism, trans. John Butt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947), p. 20. 9 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 515.

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10 Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986; reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 21. 11 Harriet Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy (9 vols, London: Charles Fox, 1834), IX: p. 144. 12 Leigh Hunt, ‘Fiction and Matter of Fact’ in Men, Women and Books: A Selection of Sketches, Essays and Critical Memoirs from His Uncollected Prose Writings (2 vols, London: Smith, Elder, 1870), MWB, I: p. 2. 13 Leigh Hunt, ‘Life and Letters of Madame de Sévigné’ in MWB, II: pp. 306–7. 14 ‘To William Shelley’ (‘My lost William’), in WPBS, III: p. 296. 15 Gates, p. 96. 16 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969), p. 910. 17 ‘Fiction and Matter of Fact’, MWB, I: p. 2. 18 MWB, I: p. 2. 19 Contralto Songs (2 vols, London and New York: Boosey & Co, No Date), I: pp. 51–4. 20 Autobiography, III: p. 20. 21 Minor Latin Poets, with Introductions and English Translations, trans. J.Wight Duff and Arnold M.Duff (London: William Heinemann, 1954), pp. 444–5. 22 Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818, LJK, I: p. 281. 23 Autobiography, I: p. 192. 24 Catullus, Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris, trans. F.W.Cornish, J. P Postgate and J.W.Mackail (London: William Heinemann, 1968), p. 4. 25 Tennyson, Complete Poems, p. 785. 26 The Norton Anthology of Poetry Margaret Ferguson, ed. Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (New York: W.W.Norton, 1996), p. 1016. 27 Ibid., p. 947. 28 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Poems of Goethe: Translated in the Original Metres, trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (London: George Bell, 1885), p. 183. 29 Goethe, Poems, p. 183. 30 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F.E Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 51. 31 Herbert, Works, p. 75.

12

Leigh Hunt Interviews and recollections, 1832–1921 Nicholas Roe

This chapter brings together views of Hunt from contemporaries and later generations. Material has been selected for what it tells us about Hunt in his own times, and I have included accounts that differ from received views, such as Elizabeth Barrett’s defence of the Story of Rimini as ‘morally unexceptionable’. Likewise, Charles Cowden Clarke’s romantic description of Hunt at Surrey prison contrasts with Cyrus Redding’s memory of the same scene as ‘a miserable low site…close upon the verge of insalubrity’. Two of Charles Dickens’s explanations of the character of Harold Skimpole may be read alongside Elizabeth Gaskell’s summary of the distress the caricature brought to Hunt. Samuel Carter Hall offers an insight into Hunt’s ‘Religion of the Heart’; Thomas Hardy gives a tantalising glimpse of Hunt in company with ‘an unknown youth’, John Keats. Describing a stroll across Wimbledon Common, W.M.Thackeray reveals Hunt’s familiarity with radicals John Home Tooke, Sir Francis Burdett and John Thelwall; taking a longer view, P.G.Patmore and Virginia Woolf pay tribute to Hunt’s influence on political and social change in Britain. William Bell Scott records Hunt’s esteem for Coleridge, while Elizabeth Barrett, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Carlyle, David MacBeth Moir and Algernon Charles Swinburne praise the range of Hunt’s achievement. Hunt’s old friend William Hazlitt suggests the facility with which his writings ‘translate into the man’, and, in a perceptive character sketch, encapsulates the purpose of this chapter to ‘improve acquaintance’ with him.

William Allingham

William Allingham (1824–89) was a customs officer in Ireland and England (1846–70) before becoming a full-time writer and one of the Rossetti PreRaphaelite circle. This passage from his diary describes his first meeting with Hunt, 27 June 1847, who subsequently introduced him to Carlyle. In 1850 Allingham’s first volume, Poems, was dedicated to Hunt; his epitaph for Hunt, ‘Write me as one that loves his fellow-men’, appears on Hunt’s grave in Kensal Green Cemetery (see Blunden, pp. 350–1).

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Sunday Evening, June 27.—32 Edwardes Square, and find Leigh Hunt at last. I was shown into the Study, and had some minutes to look round at the Book-cases, Busts, old framed engravings, and to glance at some of the books on the table, diligently marked and noted in the well-known neatest of hand-writings. Outside the window climbed a hop on its trellis. The door opened and in came the Genius Loci, a tallish young old man, in dark dressing-gown and wide turned-down collar, his copious iron-gray hair falling almost to his shoulders. The friendly brown eyes, simple yet fine-toned voice, easy hand-pressure, gave me greeting as to one already well-known to him. Our talk fell first on reason and instinct; he maintained (for argument’s sake, I thought) that beasts may be equal or superior to men. He has a light earnestness of manner, and toleration for almost every possible different view from his own. Of freewill he said, ‘I would much rather be without it. I should like to feel myself taken care of in the arms of beneficent power.— Paganini incomparable; when he came forward and struck the first chord, my neighbour in the Opera pit (an Italian) exclaimed in a low voice, “O Dio!” Violin, or better violino, is the name for his instrument. Common English players fiddle, it is a good word for their playing. Macready is not a genius, he is our best actor now because there is no other. He keeps a fine house, but is not in what is called the best society.’ I ask him about certain highly interesting men. ‘Dickens—a pleasant fellow, very busy now, lives in an old house in Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone.’ Friday, July 2, Evening.—Leigh Hunt’s. He was tired, but asked me to stay. L.H.—‘I hate Dante: in reading him I first found that a great Poet can be an unamiable man. Wordsworth was personally very disagreeable. I am asked to meet Hans Christian Andersen, now in London. Can’t understand why people want to see me—I am used to myself. O yes, I like to see some men of letters. Dislike mountains, can’t bear height, my legs shudder at the thought of it.—London is the best place for you; why don’t you try and live in it?’ Walk back.1

Elizabeth Barren

Elizabeth Barrett (1806–61) greatly admired Hunt as a poet. Here she writes about her response to The Story of Rimini: To Mary Russell Mitford, 25 July 1841: I think he has been wronged by many,—& that even you, your own just truthful & appreciating self, do not choose soft words enough to suit his case. For instance—it never was proved either to my reason or my feelings that Rimini had an immoral tendency. Indeed my belief is

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exactly the reverse. The final impression of that poem, most beautiful surely as a poem, appears to me morally unexceptionable. The ‘poetical justice’ is worked out too from the sin itself,—& not from a cause independent of it,—after the fashion of those pseudo moralists who place the serpent’s sting anywhere but in the serpent. We are made to feel & see that apart from the discovery, apart from the husband’s vengeance on the lover, both sinners are miserable & one must die. She was dying, without that blow—The sin involved the deathagony!—Who can read these things tearless, & without a deep enforced sense of ‘the sinfulness of sin’?2

Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë’s publishers Smith & Elder sent her a presentation copy of Hunt’s Christmas book for 1847, A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla. The book had a decorated binding, showing a blue jar wreathed with green tendrils against a honey-yellow background, all framed by ivy. In this letter she enclosed the corrected proof preface for the second edition of Jane Eyre: To Messrs Smith, Elder and Co., 25 December 1847: Permit me to thank you for your present which reached me yesterday. I was not prepared for anything so truly tasteful, and when I had opened the parcel, removed the various envelopes, and at last got a glimpse of the chastely attractive binding, I was most agreeably surprised. What is better; on examination, I find the contents fully answer to the expectation excited by the charming exterior; the Honey is quite as choice as the Jar is elegant. The illustrations too are very beautiful—some of them peculiarly so. I trust the Public will shew itself grateful for the pains you have taken to provide a book so appropriate to the Season.3 To W.S.Williams, 16 April 1849: I took up Leigh Hunt’s book The Town’ with an impression that it would be interesting only to Londoners, and I was surprised, ere I had read many pages, to find myself enchained by his pleasant, graceful, easy style, varied knowledge, just views and kindly spirit. There is something peculiarly anti-melancholic in Hunt’s writings—and yet they are never boisterous—they resemble sunshine—being at once bright and tranquil.4

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle and Hunt had met in 1832, and in 1834 became neighbours at Cheyne Row in Chelsea, London. This letter to Hunt is dated 17 June 1850:

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I have just finished your Autobiography, which has been most pleasantly occupying all my leisure these three days; and you must permit me to write you a word upon it, out of the fulness of the heart, while the impulse is still fresh to thank you. This good Book, in every sense one of the best I have read this long while, has awakened many old thoughts, which never were extinct, or even properly asleep, but which (like so much else) have had to fall silent amid the tempests of an evil time,—Heaven mend it! A word from me, once more, I know, will not be unwelcome, while the world is talking of you. Well, I call this an excellently good Book; by far the best of the autobiographic kind I remember to have read in the English Language; and indeed, except it be Boswell’s of Johnson, I do not know where we have such a Picture drawn of a human Life as in these three volumes. A pious, ingenious, altogether human and worthy Book; imaging, with graceful honesty and free felicity, many interesting objects and persons on your life-path,—and imaging throughout, what is best of all, a gifted, gentle, patient and valiant human Soul, as it buffets its way thro’ the billows of the time, and will not drown, tho’ often in danger; cannot be drowned, but conquers, and leaves a track of radiance behind it: that, I think, comes out more clearly to me than in any other of your Books;— and that I can venture to assure you is the best of all results to realise in a Book or written record. In fact this Book has been like an exercise of devotion to me: I have not assisted at any sermon, liturgy or litany, this long while, that has had so religious an effect on me. Thanks in the name of all men. And believe along with me that this book will be welcome to other generations as well as to ours. And long may you live to write more Books for us; and may the evening sun be softer on you (and on me) than the noon sometimes was!5

Charles Smith Cheltnam

Charles Smith Cheltnam married Hunt’s daughter Jacintha in 1849; after the death of Hunt’s wife Marianne in 1857, they shared Hunt’s home at Hammersmith. The passage here is taken from Cheltnam’s manuscript ‘Recollections of Leigh Hunt’ (c. 1889); it recalls the time when Hunt was living at the Vale of Health, Hampstead, 1815–17. The ‘burly butcher’ had evidently mistaken Leigh Hunt for the radical orator Henry Hunt: He was living at Hampstead, in a house which has recently disappeared from the Vale of Health and reached home at night by a Hampstead stagecoach. On one occasion a burly butcher who was one of the outside passengers was declaiming noisily against a detestable Radical named Leigh Hunt who was goading the country into rebellion by his blatant oratory. This man was seated opposite Mr Hunt who mildly asked him

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whether he knew this dangerous Leigh Hunt by sight?—‘Know him?— Oh, yes,—I know the foul-mouthed, bullthroated scoundrel’ was the assured reply.6 Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke

Charles Cowden Clarke visited Hunt at Horsemonger Lane Gaol, and remained a lifelong friend. In 1828 he married Mary Victoria, daughter of Vincent and Mary Sabilla Novello. The first passage below is taken from Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke’s Recollections of Writers (1878); Cowden Clarke’s father was John Clarke, headmaster of Enfield School: My father so entirely sympathized with my devoted admiration of Leigh Hunt, that when, not very long after I had made his acquaintance, he was thrown into Horsemonger Lane Gaol for his libel on the Prince Regent, I was seconded in my wish to send the captive Liberal a breath of open air, and a reminder of the country pleasures he so well loved and could so well describe, by my father’s allowing me to despatch a weekly basket of fresh flowers, fruit, and vegetables from our garden at Enfield. Leigh Hunt received it with his own peculiar grace of acceptance, recognizing the sentiment that prompted the offering, and welcoming it into the spot which he had converted from a prison-room into a bower for a poet by covering the walls with a rosetrellised papering, by book-shelves, plaster casts, and a small pianoforte. Here I was also made welcome, and my visits cordially received; and here it was that I once met Thomas Moore, and on another occasion Barnes, the then sub-editor of the Times newspaper… It was not until after Leigh Hunt left prison that my father saw him, and then but once. My father and I had gone to see Kean in ‘Timon of Athens’, and as we sat together in the pit talking over the extraordinary vitality of the impersonation—the grandeur and poetry in Kean’s indignant wrath, withering scorn, wild melancholy, embittered tone, and passionate despondency—Leigh Hunt joined us and desired me to present him to my father, who, after even the first few moments, found himself deeply enthralled by that bewitching spell of manner which characterized Leigh Hunt beyond any man I have ever known. This second extract from Recollections of Writers is taken from the chapter ‘Leigh Hunt and his Letters’: In the Autumn of 1856, when we were going abroad, to live in the milder climate of Nice, we went to take leave of dear Leigh Hunt at his pretty cottage in Cornwall Road Hammersmith. We found him, as of old, with simple but tasteful environments, his books and papers about him, engravings and plaster-casts around his room; while he himself

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was full of his wonted cordiality and cheerful warmth of reception for old friends. The silvered hair, the thin pale cheek, the wondrous eyes, were no less beautiful in their aged aspect than in their youthful one; while his charm of manner was, if anything enhanced by the tender softening of years. We,—who could well remember the brilliancy and fascination of his bearing in youthful manhood, the effect of bright expectant pleasure attending his entrance into a company, the influence of his general handsomeness with refined bearing and beauty of countenance, especially the vivacity and sparkling expression of his eyes, still so dark and so fine, though with a melancholy depth in them now,—felt as though he were even more than ever beautiful to look upon.7

Charles Dickens

In this letter to Hunt, early November 1854, Dickens explains Harold Skimpole in Bleak House (1853): Separate in your own mind what you see of yourself from what other people tell you that they see. As it has given you so much pain, I take it at its worst, and say I am deeply sorry, and that I feel I did wrong in doing it. I should otherwise have taken it at its best, and ridden off upon what I strongly feel to be the truth, that there is nothing in it that should have given you pain. Everyone in writing must speak from points of his experience, and so I of mine with you: but when I have felt it was going too close I stopped myself, and the most blotted parts of my MS. are those in which I have been striving hard to make the impression I was writing from, unlike you. The diary-writing I took from Haydon, not from you. I now first learn from yourself that you never set anything to music, and I could not have copied that from you. The character is not you, for there are traits in it common to fifty thousand people besides, and I did not fancy you would ever recognize it. Under similar disguises my own father and mother are in my books, and you might as well see your likeness in Micawber.8 Following Hunt’s death, 28 August 1859, his son Thornton prompted Dickens to publish in All the Year Round an article ‘Leigh Hunt. A Remonstrance’. The article begins by quoting Thornton Hunt’s ‘Introduction’, and the ‘Postscript’ about Hunt’s death, from the second edition of the Autobiography.9 Then follows Dickens’s account of ‘the fact’ of Harold Skimpole: Exactly those graces and charms of manner which are remembered in the words we have quoted, were remembered by the author of the work

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of fiction in question, when he drew the character in question. Above all other things, that ‘sort of gay and ostentatious wilfulness’ 10 in the humouring of a subject, which had many a time delighted him, and impressed him as being unspeakably whimsical and attractive, was the airy quality he wanted for the man he invented. Partly for this reason, and partly (he has since often grieved to think) for the pleasure it afforded him to find that delightful manner reproducing itself under his hand, he yielded to the temptation of too often making the character speak like his old friend. He no more thought, God forgive him! that the admired original would ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the fictitious creature, than he has himself ever thought of charging the blood of Desdemona and Othello, on the innocent Academy model who sat for Iago’s leg in the picture. Even as to the mere occasional manner, he meant to be so cautious and conscientious, that he privately referred the proof sheets of the first number of that book to two intimate literary friends of Leigh Hunt (both still living), and altered the whole of that part of the text on their discovering too strong a resemblance of his ‘way’.11

Elizabeth Gaskell

In this letter to George Smith, 27 December 1859, Elizabeth Gaskell mentions an exchange in summer 1856 between William Wetmore Story, the American sculptor and author, and Hunt. Story had indicated that a Mr. Lee had set aside ‘the sum of 500 dollars with which he intended to purchase something of value and ask [Hunt’s] acceptance of it’.12 Hunt’s graceful reply, 13 August 1856, appears in CLH, II: pp. 273–4; it intimates that the ‘shock’ of the Skimpole caricature had determined him never again to accept such gifts. In last week’s No of All the Year Round is a repudiation (by Mr Dickens,) of having intended Leigh Hunt by Harrold Skimpole. Please do not bring me into communication with Mr Thornton Hunt if I tell you something. Four years ago when my friend Mr Story returned to Europe from America he was charged by some rich American, (name told me, but which I forget,) to see how 100£, or even 200, could be made most acceptable to Leigh Hunt. Mr Story wrote to L.H. asking the question,—in a charming frank way I am sure; and he received back such a beautiful letter from L.Hunt,—which I am sure those interested in his memory should see,—if not have published. Of course I can not do justice to it, but I know he declined receiving the money in any shape— statue, cash, books,—in the firmest & most graceful manner; saying that the readiness with which he had formerly been willing to accept from friends, what, if their circumstances had been reversed he should have been so glad & thankful to have rendered them,—had been cruelly misunderstood & misrepresented; & that he now felt it due to himself to

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reject material kindness, while he was fully alive as ever to the nobleness of heart which offered it.13 Samuel Carter Hall

Samuel Carter Hall (1800–89), ‘a most industrious literary man’ (Dictionary of National Biography) was editor of the Amulet (1826–36), and sub-editor and then editor of the New Monthly Magazine (1830–6). He met Hunt soon after his return from Italy in 1825. His religion…was cheerful, hopeful, sympathising, universal in its benevolence, and entirely comprehensive in charity, but it was not the religion of the Christian; it was not even that of the Unitarian. He recognised Christ, indeed, but classes Him only among those—not even foremost of them—who were lights in dark ages; ‘great lights’, as he styles them, ‘of rational piety and benignant intercourse’—Confucius, Socrates, Epictetus, Antoninus. Jesus was their ‘martyred brother’, nothing more. His published book entitled ‘The Religion of the Heart’ (1853) is but little known; I hope it will never be reprinted.14 Thomas Hardy

This short note, dated 8 April 1915, is Hardy’s response to a request from Sir Sidney Colvin for material for his biography John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame (1917): I just remember this trifle, & send it on for what it may be worth in your Life. Swinburne told me that Mrs. Proctor, (Barry Cornwall’s widow) told him that one day when Leigh Hunt called on her father he brought with him an unknown youth who was casually mentioned as being a Mr John Keats.15 William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt contributed to the Examiner and the Liberal, and collaborated with Hunt on The Round Table (1817). In 1825 Hazlitt included Hunt in The Spirit of the Age (1825), from which this portrait is taken: He improves upon acquaintance. The author translates admirably into the man. Indeed the very faults of his style are virtues in the individual. His natural gaiety and sprightliness of manner, his high animal spirits, and the vinous quality of his mind, produce an immediate fascination and intoxication in those who come in contact with him, and carry off in society whatever in his writings may to some seem flat and impertinent.

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From great sanguineness of temper, from great quickness and unsuspecting simplicity, he runs on to the public as he does at his own fire-side, and talks about himself, forgetting that he is not always among friends.16 Charles and Edmund Kean

In his biography of the actor Charles Kean, John William Cole mentions a conversation with Charles Kean’s father, Edmund Kean, who, ‘when he had been vexed by recent criticisms, complained that the newspapers made sad mistakes as to his conceptions of character. “These people”’, Kean said, ‘“Don’t understand their business”’. Leigh Hunt, by contrast, understood his business completely: In 1807 a small volume was published by Leigh Hunt, entitled ‘Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres’, being a rifaccimento or enlarged edition of a course of theatrical articles which originally appeared in a weekly paper called The News. Many of these are ably written, and the work may be referred to as a fair specimen of this class of composition. Hazlitt’s notices, written when he was a reporter for more than one paper, have also been collected into a volume, which has gone through several editions, under the title of ‘A View of the English Stage’, and have acquired considerable reputation; but they are inferior to Hunt’s, both in sound judgment and impartiality. They abound in smart severities, and epigrammatic ad captandum turns; but the book is valuable as a stage record…17 Edmund Kean

During 1814, while Hunt was in prison, Edmund Kean made his debut on the London stage. After his release Hunt resumed theatrical reviews for the Examiner and was eager to see Kean as Richard III. Initially perplexed by Kean’s ‘stagy’ manner and energetic delivery, Hunt soon responded to gestures and ‘turns of countenance’ which, he thought, had a naturalness uniting ‘common life with tragedy’ (E, 26 February 1815), p. 140. This passage from Kean’s biography describes Hunt’s role in furthering the actor’s reputation and career: The ranks of the critics now received an important addition. Leigh Hunt, released from the imprisonment to which he had been sentenced for having inserted in the Examiner what the sensitive Regent regarded as libels upon his fair fame and character, resumed the editorship of that newspaper, more especially the theatrical department, and exhibited a tasteful sensibility to those exquisite touches in Kean’s acting which in the very midst of tragedy introduced a noble and natural familiarity

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utterly unknown in the mere declaimer. He applauded the actor’s gestures and turns of countenance as tending in a very happy manner to unite common life with tragedy, ‘which’, he says, ‘is the great stage desideratum’; he regarded him to be equal at all times to the best actors in vogue, and to going far beyond them in particular passages; and makes up for a few hypercritical objections (subsequently withdrawn) with the grand avowal that Mr. Kean’s performances never interfered with his conception of the character, but that, on the contrary, he uniformly raised his imagination of the part he acted.18

Thomas Macaulay

This letter to an unidentified correspondent probably dates from January 1832, when subscriptions for Hunt’s Poetical Works were being sought. Macaulay signed the prospectus for the publication of Poetical Works in the Athenaeum (18 February 1832), p. 114. Macaulay later helped to arrange a government pension for Hunt. Sir,— I will with great pleasure give to the plan which you have communicated to me any little advantage which it may derive from my name. I wish to subscribe for one copy of the poems, and I heartily wish that it were in my power to do more. I do not know Mr. Leigh Hunt by sight; I dissent from many of his opinions; but I admire his talents—I pity his misfortunes—and I cannot think without indignation of some part of the treatment which he has experienced.—I have the honour to be, Sir, your faithful servant, T.B.Macaulay.19

Mary Russell Mitf ord

Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855) poet, playwright and novelist, enjoyed success in the London theatres (particularly with her tragedy Rienzi in 1828), and fame with her prose sketches, ‘Our Village’, which dated from the 1820s. Her Recollections of a Literary Life (1852) proved similarly popular. The account of Hunt looks back to the literary warfare of the 1810s: The days are happily past when the paltry epithet of ‘Cockney Poets’ could be bestowed upon Keats and Leigh Hunt: the world has outlived them. People would as soon think of applying such a word to Dr. Johnson. Happily, too, one of the delightful writers who were the objects of these unworthy attacks has outlived them also; he has lived to attain a popularity of the most genial kind, and to diffuse, through a thousand pleasant channels, many of the finest parts of our finest writers. He has

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done good service to literature in another way, by enriching our language with some of the very best translations since Cowley…. In justice to Mr. Leigh Hunt, I add to these fine translations, of which every lover of Italian literature will perceive the merit, some extracts from his original poems, which need no previous preparation in the reader. Except Chaucer himself, no painter of processions has excelled the entrance of Paulo to Ravenna, in the story of Rimini.20

David MacBeth Moir

David MacBeth Moir (1798–1851), physician, poet, medical writer, and journalist, contributed widely to periodicals including Blackwood’s Magazine. He edited Felicia Hemans’s works. In 1851 he gave a course of lectures on ‘The Poetical Literature of the past Half Century’, in which the account of Hunt is valuable as a mid-nineteenth-century estimate of his achievement: Although previously well known as an acute dramatic critic, and a clever writer of occasional verses, it was by the production of the ‘Story of Rimini’ that Leigh Hunt put in his successful claim to a place among British poets. That he is himself truly a poet, a man of original and peculiar genius, there can be no possible doubt; but the fountains of inspiration from which his urn drew much light, were Boccaccio, ‘he of the hundred tales of love’; Dante, in whose ‘Inferno’ is to be found the exquisite episode of ‘Francesca’, which he expanded; and Ariosto, from whose sparkling and sprightly pictures he took many of the gay, bright colours with which he emblazoned his own. With acute powers of conception, a sparkling and lively fancy, and quaintly curious felicity of diction, the grand characteristic of Leigh Hunt’s poetry is word-painting; and in this he is probably without a rival, save in the last and best productions of Keats, who contended, not vainly, with his master on that ground. In this respect, nothing can be more remarkable than some passages in ‘Rimini’, and in his collection entitled ‘Foliage’…21

Henry Morley

Henry Morley (1822–94) contributed to and edited Charles Dickens’s Household Words (1851–9). Subsequently Lecturer in English at King’s College and then Professor of English at University College, London. This extract from Morley’s diary records a dinner with Dickens’s biographer John Forster, 4 January 1858, at which Forster described Hunt at Hammersmith. Hunt’s wife Marianne had died the preceding year.

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Forster described a recent call upon Leigh Hunt (who could make any room beautiful for ninepence), whom he found in a mean, miserable room, with two plates laid upon a dirty tablecloth, knives and forks such as a labourer would use, and comfort nowhere, sitting huddled over the little fire with a silk cape over his shoulders, face so pinched that it was almost gone, and poring with great lustrous eyes over his paper as he wrote. He looked like an old French abbé. But the soul of Leigh Hunt was at work in him, for he was busy over his dear friends Chaucer and Spenser.22 P.G.Patmore

Peter George Patmore (1786–1855), friend of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, contributed widely to journals in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was editor of the New Monthly Magazine (1841–53). In his autobiography My Friends and Acquaintance he described a visit with Hazlitt to John Hunt at Coldbath Fields Prison. The following extract has been taken from that recollection: As I afterwards became acquainted with Mr. John Hunt and his accomplished brother, and had all my first impressions confirmed about the former, I cannot let slip this occasion of testifying my belief, that the wholesome and happy change that has taken place in our political and social institutions since the period above referred to, and is still in happy progress, is owing in no small degree to the excellent individuals just named; for I verily believe that, without the manly firmness, the immaculate political honesty, and the vigorous good sense of the one, and the exquisite genius and varied accomplishments, guided by the allpervading and all-embracing humanity of the other, we should at this moment have been without many of those writers and thinkers on whose unceasing efforts the slow but sure march of our political, and, with it, our social regeneration as a people mainly depends. Of this I am certain—that without the writings of Mr. Leigh Hunt himself, we should have missed a large measure of that high and pure tone of political and social feeling from which everything is to be hoped in the way of progress towards future good; and (having which) nothing need be feared in the way of retrogression towards past evil.23 Bryan Waller Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’)

In The Literary Recollections of Barry Cornwall (1877) Bryan Waller Procter recalled his first meeting with Leigh Hunt: When I first visited Leigh Hunt (1817), he lived at No. 8, York Buildings, in the New Road. His house was small, and scantily furnished. In it was a

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tiny room, built out at the back of the drawing-room or first floor, which he appropriated as a study, and over the door of this was a line from the ‘Faery Queen’ of Spenser, painted in gold letters. On a small table in this study, covered with humble green baize, Leigh Hunt sat and wrote his articles for the ‘Examiner’ and ‘Indicator’, and his verses. He had very few books, an edition of the Italian poets in many volumes, Spenser’s works, and the minor poems of Milton (edited by Warton) being, however, amongst them. I don’t think there was a Shakespeare. There were a few cut flowers, in a glass of water, on the table…. He was very good tempered; thoroughly easy tempered. He saw hosts of writers, of less ability than himself, outstripping him on the road to future success, yet I never heard from him a word that could be construed into jealousy or envy; not even a murmur.24

Cyrus Redding

Cyrus Redding (1785–1870) was a journalist and editor of numerous journals including Galignani’s Messenger (1815–18), The New Monthly Magazine (1821– 30) and the Metropolitan (1831–3). He was Paris correspondent for the Examiner in 1815, and in 1829–30 contributed lives of Keats, Shelley and Coleridge to Galignani’s Complete Edition of Poets. This passage from Redding’s Fifty Years’ Recollections, Literary and Personal (1858) describes a visit in May 1813 to Hunt in Horsemonger Lane Gaol. Unlike other such accounts, which dwell upon Hunt’s fanciful decorations, Redding draws attention to the unpleasant actuality of Hunt’s surroundings: I remember paying Leigh Hunt a visit in Horsemonger Lane Jail, a miserable low site. I missed Byron and Moore, by only about halfanhour, on the same errand. Horace Smith, and Shelley used to be visitors there, and many others of Hunt’s friends. He was composing ‘Rimini’, a copy of which he gave me, and which I still possess. His apartment, on the ground floor, was cheerful for such a place, but that only means a sort of lacquered gloom after all. I thought of his health, which seemed by no means strong. I am certain, if the place was not unwholesome, it lay close upon the verge of insalubrity. Hunt bore his confinement cheerfully, but he must have had unpleasant moments. He was naturally lively, and in those days, I never knew a more entertaining companion. For such an one to be alone for weary, dreary hours, it must have been punishment enough, even to satisfy an Ellenborough or a Jeffries. When he resided in the New Road, I spent many an evening with him, pleasant, informing, and varied by conversation on subjects that chance brought up, or association introduced stealthily. I visited him in the Vale of Health at Hampstead, where there was always a heartiness

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that tempted confidence, and with much imaginativeness, much skimming of literature, and a light culling of its wild flowers, criticism without envy, and opinions free of insincerity. Leigh Hunt yet survives, or I might be tempted to proceed to many details, which would infringe the rule I have made for myself in the mention of but few who are still spared from a day of our literature, the similar of which is hardly likely soon, if ever, to recur again.25

William Bell Scott

William Bell Scott (1811–90) was a painter, poet, and miscellaneous writer, with a wide acquaintance among contemporary writers. In this passage from his Autobiographical Notes, Scott recalls a visit to Hunt at Chelsea in May, 1837: As a perfectionist in poetry, whose thought and rhythm were one, he seemed to hold Coleridge above all others. Nor did he limit his high praise to the four or five exceptional poems we all hold so high, a small modicum out of the mass, but included others as equally admirable, though much less interesting. He described with genuine delight a day he spent at Fiesole: a loitering day with the wild tulips about the ground where he walked, when he was haunted by ‘Kubla Khan’, the poem of poems, from noon till night. ‘It was just because the place, the climate, and the poem were homogenous’, he explained.26

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne’s grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, had visited Hunt in Horsemonger Lane Gaol; Hunt reciprocated by dedicating Foliage to him, and christened his third son Swinburne. To William Michael Rossetti, 14 October 1877: I picked up on Friday six volumes of The Examiner (1808–1814)… What I have read of the ‘leaders’ in these volumes has decidedly raised my opinion of Leigh Hunt. They are more generally outspoken than I expected, and not infrequently very well written.27 Swinburne had high regard for Dickens and Hunt. In the following letter to the Editor of the Westminster Gazette, 21 July 1902, he attempted to rescue both from the Skimpole controversy, and refers to Dickens’s article ‘Leigh Hunt. A Remonstrance’, quoted above: I wish I could think that I had always been wrong in thinking or feeling that Dickens’s rejoinder to the charge of libel on the character of Leigh Hunt was singularly incomplete, ineffective, and awkward. I am old

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enough to remember its appearance, and the fact that I never met anybody at the time who did not think it more and worse than inadequate as an apology. ‘God forgive him,’ by all means; but mere men, I fancy, will as a rule agree with me that the due reply should have been the shorter and more straightforward one, which would at once have indicated and established the outrageous absurdity of the libellous imputation.28 Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Writing to John Forster in late April 1850, following the death of William Wordsworth, Tennyson mentions possible successors to the Laureateship: I see that the Spectator mentions two candidates for the Laureateship basking in the sunshine of royal favour. Does he mean already enjoying pensions? If so, does he mean L.Hunt and myself. I sincerely hope Hunt will get it rather than myself.29 W.M.Thackeray

In this diary entry, 17 August 1846, Thackeray records a day passed at Wimbledon with Bryan Waller Procter, John Forster, and Hunt. John Home Tooke (1736–1812) was a reformer and philologist; Hunt recalled in his Autobiography that his father had taken him to meet Tooke, who ‘patted [him] on the head’ (Autobiography, I: pp. 163–4). John Thelwall (1764–1834), poet, journalist, lecturer on literature and elocution, was the most prominent English Jacobin of the 1790s: Had a very pleasant stroll on Monday on Wimbledon Common with Procter Forster & Leigh Hunt. Hunt as usual in great force; his wan good humoured face encircled with a great clean shirt-collar, and a sort of holiday dress put on to receive us. Passing by Home Tooke’s house we talked about Pitt deserted on his death-bed like William the Conqueror—and Tooke’s friends Burdett & orator Thelwall. ‘Thelwall I knew’, Hunt said, he was a practitioner of oratory and believed in it.’ But I won’t put down the bad puns the good fellow made at a most comfortable dinner at the Rose & Crown J Jouster served by a neat-handed little waitress who blushed hugely when she told us there were stewed eels & roast ducks for dinner. All was very good, too good—the champagne & claret just for all the world like London wine.30 George Ticknor

George Ticknor (1791–1871) was first professor of modern languages at Harvard University. He studied at Göttingen University, 1815–17, then

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travelled in Europe. On Saturday 3 April 1819, Hunt attended the first performance of Charles Bucke’s tragedy The Italians; or, the Fatal Accusation at the Drury Lane Theatre, and found ‘the pit all waving their hats in an uproar’ (E, 4 April 1819, p. 223). The following Monday George Ticknor and Washington Irving also attended; ‘a riot had been foreseen’ and the actors were greeted with ‘indignant cries and showers of orange-peels’. Hunt was in the audience on this evening too: he had found ‘good materials’ in the play, but also ‘weak writing’ and ‘wretched acting’ (E, 4 April 1819, p. 222–3)—and was apparently saying so, when George Ticknor glimpsed him: When it was finished, the uproar, which I thought before as intense as it could be, seemed to be doubled. Several persons came forward to speak, but could not be heard. Hunt, who sat two boxes from us, collected a little audience and declaimed a few moments, but to very little purpose, for those more than ten feet from him were only spectators of his furious manner; and all parts of the house seemed about breaking forth into an outrageous riot.31

Virginia Woolf

This entry from Virginia Woolf’s diary, 13 August 1921, transcribes Hunt’s account of Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt, Autobiography, II: pp. 222–4, and then reflects: L.H. was our spiritual grandfather, a free man. One could have spoken to him as to Desmond. A light man, I daresay, but civilised, much more so than my grandfather in the flesh. These free, vigorous spirits advance the world, & when one lights on them in the strange waste of the past one says Ah you’re my sort—a great compliment. Most people who died 100 years ago are like strangers. One is polite & uneasy with them. Shelley died with Hunt’s copy of Lamia in his hand. H. wd. receive it back from no other, & so burnt it on the pyre. Going home from the funeral H & Byron laughed till they split. This is human nature, & H. doesn’t mind owning to it. Then I like his inquisitive human sympathies: history so dull because of its battles & laws; & sea voyages in books so dull because the traveller will describe beauties instead of going into the cabins & saying what the sailors looked like, wore, eat, said; how they behaved.32

William Wordsworth

In this letter to John Forster, 19 December 1831, William Wordsworth agrees to subscribe to Moxon’s forthcoming edition of Hunt’s Poetical Works. By

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1831 Wordsworth had long been marked as ‘government property’ (Hunt’s words, see Feast, p. 99), and was wary that the subscription might indicate support for Hunt’s political opinions (see the second letter below): Rydal Mount Decr 19th, 1831 Sir, I was much concerned to learn from your letter and its inclosure that Mr. L.Hunt was suffering from ill health and embarrassed circumstances; to the relief of which I should be happy to contribute as far as my Subscription goes, and regret that from my sequestered situation here, I can do little more. The consideration of Mr Hunt being a Man of Genius and Talents, and in distress, will, I trust, prevent your proposal being taken as a test of opinion, and that the benevolent purpose will be promoted by men of all parties. I am Sir, sincerely yours Wm Wordsworth On the same day Wordsworth forwarded the appeal for Hunt with his reply (see above) to Robert Southey, Poet Laureate, requesting him to check the contents of his letter: My dear S. Probably you have received a Copy of the enclosed—if you have not, pray look them over, and also my Answer—and if you approve of the latter, seal and send it to the Post off: otherwise tell me what you think I ought to do—Strongly desirous as I am to relieve a distressed Man, I should deny myself that pleasure if thereby I seem to be committed to an approval of the use which Mr H. may have made of his talents. Ever faithfully yours Wm Wordsworth33

Notes 1 William Allingham, A Diary, ed. H.Allingham and D.Radford (London: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 35–7. 2 The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley, Ronald Hudson and Scott Lewis (13 vols, Winfield, Kansas: Wedgestone Press, 1984–95), V: p. 89. 3 The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith (2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995–2000), I: p. 586. 4 The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, II: p. 202. 5 The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, gen. ed. Charles Richard Sanders (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1970–), xxv: pp. 97–8. 6 British Library Add. Mss 46202. 7 See Recollections of Writers (1878; Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur Press, 1969), pp. 17– 18, 263–4.

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8 The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Kathleen Tillotson, Graham Storey et al. (11 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–99), VII: p. 460. Haydon is Benjamin Robert Haydon, the historical painter and diarist. 9 See Autobiography (1860), pp. v–xvii, 452. For the background to ‘Leigh Hunt. A Remonstrance’ see Blunden, pp. 317–18. 10 Dickens quotes from Thornton Hunt’s Introduction to Autobiography (1860), p. xiv. 11 See All the Year Round. A Weekly Journal, II (24 December, 1859), pp. 206–8. Hunt’s literary friends consulted by Dickens were John Forster and Bryan Waller Procter. 12 See W.W. Story to Thornton Hunt, 24 March 1861, in Luther A.Brewer, My Leigh Hunt Library: The Holograph Letters (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1938), pp. 346–7. 13 The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J.A.V.Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 596–7. 14 S.C.Hall, A Book of Memories of Great Men and Women of the Age, from Personal Acquaintance (London: Virtue & Co., 1871), p. 250. 15 Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Milgate (7 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978–88), V: p. 90. Anne Procter’s step-father was Basil Montagu. 16 ‘Mr. Moore—Mr. Leigh Hunt’, from The Spirit of the Age in Howe, XI: p. 176. 17 John William Cole, The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean FSA (2 vols, London: Richard Bentley, 1859), I: p. 51. 18 F.W.Hawkins, The Life of Edmund Kean (2 vols, London: Tinsley Brothers, 1869), I: pp. 315–16. 19 The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas Pinney (5 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974–1981), II: p. 112. 20 Mary Russell Mitford, Recollections of a Literary Life (3 vols, London: Richard Bentley, 1852), II: pp. 172, 176. 21 David MacBeth Moir, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century (2nd edn., Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1852), pp. 213–14. 22 See Henry Solly, The Life of Henry Morley, LLD (London: Edward Moxon, 1898), pp. 235–6. I thank Dr. Andrew Murphy for this recollection of Hunt. 23 P.G.Patmore, My Friends and Acquaintance: Being Memorials, Mind Portraits, and Personal Recollections of Deceased Celebrities of the Nineteenth Century (3 vols, London: Saunders and Otley, 1854), II: pp. 100–2. 24 See The Literary Recollections of Barry Cornwall (1877; Boston, 1936), pp. 83–4, 86–7. 25 Cyrus Redding, Fifty Years’ Recollections, Literary and Personal, with Observations on Men and Things (3 vols, London: Charles J.Skeat, 1858), I: pp. 274. On release from prison Hunt went to live in the ‘New Road’, which extended from City Road to Edgware Road; in October 1815 he returned to the Vale of Health at Hampstead. 26 William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes (2 vols, London: James R.Osgood, Mcllvaine and Co, 1892), I: pp. 124–5. 27 The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y.Lang (6 vols, New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1959–62), IV: p. 24. 28 The Swinburne Letters, VI: p. 161. 29 The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Cecil Y.Lang and Edgar F.Shannon, Jr., (3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–90), I: p. 324. 30 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N.Ray (4 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945–6), II: p. 248.

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31 The Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (2 vols, London, 1876), I: p. 292. 32 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (5 vols, London: The Hogarth Press, 1977–84), II: p. 130. ‘Desmond’ is Desmond MacCarthy (1877–1952), author, critic and literary editor of the New Statesman. Woolf also alludes here to Hunt’s account of Shelley’s cremation, Autobiography, III: pp. 17–18, and to his description of his sea-voyage to Italy Autobiography, II: pp. 230–307. 33 See The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Second Edition, The Later Years, Part II, 1829–1834, ed. E.De Selincourt, rev. and ed. Alan G.Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 466–7.

Index

LH=Leigh Hunt Abrams, M.H. 12 actors 2, 25, 51, 52, 54n, 229; see also mental theatre Akenside, Mark 2; Hymn to the Naiads 69 Alfieri, Vittorio 100 Allingham, William 11, 214–15; epitaph for LH 214; Poems 214 Allott, Miriam 132n Anacreon 68, 138, 171, 176–7; Ode no. 54 132n; ‘Roses’ 177; ‘The Dance’ 176; ‘The Seat Under the Tree’ 177 Andersen, Hans Christian 215 anthologies and reference works 10, 12, 26–7, 28, 29, 121, 152 Antoninus 221 Arabian Nights 27 Ariosto, Lodovico 104, 125, 224 Arnold, Matthew 205; ‘Dover Beach’ 115 Aske, Martin 195n Augustans 65, 120, 199–200, 212 Bacon, Francis 125 Bailey, Benjamin 67, 73, 74 Baldwin, Edward: see Godwin, William ballooning 167, 179n Barbauld, Anna Letitia 12 Barnard, John x, 13, 32–57 Barnes, Thomas 24, 60, 146–7, 218; LH’s sonnet to 164 Barrell, John 123, 124, 133n Barrett, Elizabeth 7, 10, 11, 77n, 214, 215–16 Bartell, Edmund 86 Barthes, Roland 162 Bate, Walter Jackson 119, 148

Bayley, John 115n Beer, John 115n Bell, Andrew 55n Bell, John: New Pantheon 74 Bensley, Thomas 46, 47, 56n Bentham, Jeremy 3, 125 Bernstein, Charles 157 Betjeman, John 1, 11, 24 Bible: see under Christianity Bion 68; ‘The Teacher Taught’ 176 Blackwood, William 197n Blainey, Ann: Immortal Boy 12 Blake, William 1, 11, 58, 59, 167, 175; Songs of Innocence and of Experience 1 Bloom, Harold 12, 59 Blunden, Edmund 8, 9, 11, 69, 76n, 77n; Leigh Hunt:A Biography 11; Leigh Hunt’s ‘Examiner’Examined, 1808– 1825 11 Boccaccio, Giovanni 60, 65, 224; Nymphs of Fiesole 69 Borgia, Lucretia 104 Boswell, James 99, 217; The Life of Samuel Johnson Lld 217 Bowles, William 19 Boyer, James 20, 22–3, 26, 27, 28 Brecht, Bertolt 162 Brewer, Luther: My Leigh Hunt Library The First Editions 11; The Holograph Letters 11 Brewer-Leigh Hunt Collection xvi, 11 38; see also University of Iowa Libraries Bromwich, David 154n Brontë, Charlotte 11, 214, 216; Jane Eyre 216

234

Index

Brontë, Emily: ‘The Prisoner’ 209 Brown, Charles Armitage 8, 16–17n, 86–7, 91–2n Brown, Harry: see under Hunt, James Henry Leigh: Life Brown, Thomas: see under Moore, Thomas Brown, Tom 81 Browne, Sir Thomas 71 Browning, Robert 99, 106, 146, 209 Bucke, Charles 229 Burdett, Sir Francis 214, 228 Burke, Edmund 167, 186; Reflections on the Revolution in France 25 Butler, Marilyn 12 Butler, Samuel 28 Byron, Lord 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 19, 58, 60, 63, 64–6, 69, 75, 76n, 95, 97, 98–100, 103, 104, 106, 125, 135, 136, 140, 142, 149, 150–1, 154n, 168, 189, 190, 193, 197n, 203, 226, 229; Childe Harold III 63–4, 70, 74, Childe Harold IV 69, 77n; Don Juan 8, 73, 135; Eastern Tales 150; Lara 150–1; Marino Faliero 96; ‘Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill’ 64; The Vision of Judgement 7; ‘Windsor Poetics’ 64 Campbell, Thomas 10 Canning, George 188 canons 11, 12, 121, 130, 146, 156, 178 capitalism 84–5 Carlyle, Thomas 9, 11, 15, 214, 216–17 cartoons 3, 4 Castlereagh, Viscount Robert Stewart 139 Catullus 13, 64–5, 68–9, 154n, 160, 168–9, 177–8, 179n; ‘Atys’ 68–9, 177–8; ‘The Nuptial Song of Julia and Manlius’ 68–9, 178 Chapman, George 158 Chatham, Lord: see Pitt, William Chaucer, Geoffrey 27, 65, 79, 97, 124, 125, 160, 165, 224, 225 Cheltnam, Charles Smith: ‘Recollections of Leigh Hunt’ (MS) 217–18 Cheney, David 12 Christ’s Hospital 1, 13, 19–31, 58, 121; churchgoing 21; diet 20–1; fagging 23–4, 26; ‘Fazzer’ 19–20; flogging 23; friends 24; masters 20, 22–3, 26, 27, 28; sexual abuse 23

Christianity 67–8, 74, 75, 188, 198, 202–4, 205(see also St Paul); Anglican universities 208; Authorized Version 208; devotional offices (Catholic and Anglican) 199; dogmas 202, 203, 204, 208; and Islam and Judaism 204; Jesus, moral teachings of 203, 221; Magnificat 212; Revelation 206; Vulgate 208 Cicero 22 Clare, John 89 Clarke, Charles Cowden 3, 13, 32–57, 62, 69, 212, 218–19; Commonplace Book 32, 53; essay in Literary Pocket-Book 52; father: see Clarke, John; marriage to Vincent Novello’s daughter 218; old nurse 46, 56n; poetry 53; theatre reviewing 52; Works: An Address to that Quarterly Reviewer who Touched upon Mr. Leigh Hunt’s ‘Story of Rimini’ 32–3, 43–5, 57n; ‘On Visiting a Beautiful Little ‘Dell near Margate’ 52; Recollections of Writers 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 41, 48, 49–50, 54, 57n, 218–19; ‘Sonnet on Peace’ 51–2 Clarke, John 33–4, 36–7, 56n, 218 Clarke, Mary Cowden 32, 33, 52, 54n, 55n, 218–19; Recollections of Writers 218; see also Clarke, Charles Cowden classical education, literature, myth 22, 24, 26, 27, 34, 48, 65–7, 68, 73, 74–5, 122, 144, 159–61, 163–4, 173–8, 182, 192, 221 Cobbett, William 124; A Grammar of the English Language 123 Cockney: Bow Bells 118, 122, 124, 132n; characteristics 132–3n; cheekiness 122–3; Cockney Rejects (punk rock group) 133n; EastEnders (soap opera) 133n; English 14, 118–34, 159, 185 (see also jargon); ‘hyper-Cockney’ 134n; Pearly Kings and Queens 123; stage Cockney 134n; taxi drivers 118, 129; variations in 122; website 133n; see also Cockney School Cockney School/Poets 7, 13–14, 58–94, 104, 189, 223; accused of pagan materialism 66–7, 74; alleged degeneracy of 78–94, 104, 165–6, 170, 180–97; anticipation of Pre-Raphaelites 110;chivalry 118–34; Cockney School essays 5,

Index 13–14, 78, 79, 81–2, 83, 90, 91, 180, 196n; see also poetic/artistic schools coffee houses and clubs 58 Cole, John William 222 Coleridge, John Taylor 185, 186, 188 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 13, 14, 19, 20, 22–3, 28–9, 76n, 96, 98, 99, 100, 106, 133n, 137, 145, 147, 154n, 164–5, 167, 168, 169, 175, 178, 179n, 180, 214, 226, 227, 229; Ancient Manner allusion 145; Biographia Literaria 5, 14–15, 19, 164–5, 180; Christabel 137; Fears in Solitude 28; ‘Frost at Midnight’ 2, 13, 19, 28–9, 98, 147; ‘Kubla Khan’ 227; Lay Sermons 70; Lyrical Ballads 106, 123; Sibylline Leaves 168 Collins, William 2, 9, 27, 160, 161 Colvin, Sir Sidney 221 Confucius 221 Congreve, William 81 Constable, John 1 Constable, Archibald 138–9, 196n Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Select Poets 27, 121 Corneille, Pierre: Le Cid 51 Cornwall, Barry 51, 57n, 60, 221, 225–6; ‘Hymn to Diana’ 57n; ‘Sonnet Descriptive of a Painting of Nicolas Poussin’ 57n; The Literary Recollections of Barry Cornwall 225–6; see also Procter, Bryan Waller Cowley, Abraham 224 Cowper, William 27, 85 Cox, Jeffrey x, 13, 58–77, 82, 93n, 99, 119–120, 130, 131n, 154n, 193, 195n; Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School 13, 58, 59 Croker, John William 184, 185, 188, 193 Croly, George 82 Cronin, Richard 13, 148, 150 Cruikshank, George 4; ‘A Free Born Englishman! The Pride of the World!’ 4 Curran, Stuart 6 Dada 167 Dante 65, 118, 119, 150, 209, 215, 224; Inferno 6, 125; Paulo and Francesca episode 6, 14, 88–90, 107–9, 119, 125, 141–2, 224; see also under Hunt, James Henry Leigh: Writings (The Story of Rimini)

235

Darwin, Charles 205, 212; The Origin of Species 199–200 Davenant, Sir William 79 Davies, Thomas 100 Dawkins, Richard 201 de Montluzin, Emily Lorraine 196n De Quincey, Thomas 77n Defoe, Daniel 79 Dekker, Thomas 79 democratic cultural idioms 27 Demosthenes 22 Dickens, Charles 9, 10, 132n, 134n, 142, 214, 215, 219–20, 224, 227–8; All the Year Round 219, 220; Bleak House 9–10, 219–20; ‘Leigh Hunt. A emonstrance’ 219–20, 227–8; Skimpole controversy 9–10, 12, 15, 142, 214, 219–20, 227–8 Dickinson, Emily 209 Diderot, Denis 162 disease 14 D’Israeli, Benjamin 10 Dover, Lord 10 Drayton, Michael 69 Dryden, John 97, 183 Duke of York 28 Duncan, Robert 158 Duppa, R.: An Inquiry concerning the Author of the Letters of junius 38, 55n Dyer, Gary 197n Dyos, H.J. 81 East Enders: see under Cockney Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning x, 13, 15, 90, 119, 143, 153n, 154n, 198–213 Edgeworth, Maria 3, 125 Edinburgh 45 effeminacy 122 egotism 5, 156, 157 Eliot, T.S. 11 elitism 27, 65, 66, 67, 68, 78–85, 91, 118–34, 142, 165–6, 172, 180–97 Enfield School 3, 32, 56n, 57n, 58 Enlightenment 85, 199 Epictetus 221 Epicureanism 186 epistemology 200 eroticism 71–5, 81–3, 93n, 108–10, 192 essays 5, 8, 9, 12, 44, 77n, 91, 98, 103, 112, 123, 146, 155n, 186; see also Cockney School Etherege, Sir George 81 Eton College: see under Shelley, Percy Bysshe

236

Index

Evangelicalism 93–4n fancy 14–15, 77n, 156–79 Fawcett, John 51, 52, 57n Fell, John 123 Fenton, James 9 Field, Barron 61, 62–3, 168; First Fruits of Australian Poetry 61; The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux 75n Fielding, Henry 28 Finch, Anne: Countess of Winchilsea 199 First World War 11 Fletcher, John 79 Fonblanque, Albany 189 Forster, John 206, 224–5, 228, 229–30, 231n Fox, Charles 36 Franklyn, Julian 123, 133n, 134n French Revolution 25, 26, 67, 70, 179n; Directory 72; Jacobins 167; storming of Bastille 27 Galignani, Giovanni Antonio 226; Complete Edition of Poets 226 gardenesque 14, 29, 84–91; see also Loudon, John Claudius; picturesque Gaskell, Elizabeth 214, 220–1 Gates, Eleanor 12 Gattie, Henry 54n Gattie brothers 34, 54n, 61, 62 Geddes, Alexander 33 George III 24, 192 Gifford, William 8, 15, 63, 95, 138, 180–97; Epistle to Peter Pindar 183; The Baviad 181, 184; The Maeviad 180 Gigliucci, Portia 54n Gilpin, William: Gardener’s Magazine 85; Practical Hints on Landscape Gardening 85 Gittings, Robert 132n Glover, Richard 38, 39, 55n; see also ‘Junius’ Godwin, William 10, 25, 59, 73–4; Political Justice 25; The Pantheon (as Edward Baldwin) 73–4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 209–11 Goldsmith, Oliver 27 Gray, Thomas 2, 9, 27, 124, 160; ‘Ode on a Distant prospect of Eton College’ 29 Greek New Testament 22, 33, 202, 204, 208; see also Christianity; St Paul

Hadrian 207 Hall, Samuel Carter 214, 221 Hamilton, Emma 93n Hammond, Thomas 32 Hardy, Thomas 214, 221 Harris, James Havell, R. 56n Havell, William 49 Hayden, John O. 106, 116n, 150 Haydn, Joseph 61, 206 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 46, 53, 56n, 61, 75n, 109, 125, 219, 231n Hazlitt, William 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 13, 14, 43, 48, 52, 56n, 60, 61, 63, 70, 72–3, 97, 125, 135, 140–1, 152, 154n, 158, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171–2, 178, 185–7, 189, 196n, 214, 221–2, 225, 229;A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. 187, 191, 197n; ‘A View of the English Stage’ 222; My First Acquaintance with Poets 7; ‘Paradox and Common-place’ 140–1; Table Talk 188; The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays 196n; ‘The Editor of the Quarterly Review’ 186–7; The Round Table 5, 60, 185–6, 221; The Spirit of the Age 63, 221–2 Hemans, Felicia Dorothea 59, 97, 224 Herbert, George 211 Hobhouse, John 58 Hogarth, William 81 Holland, Henry Fox: 3rd Baron 10, 36, 54n, 56–7n Holmes, Edward 51, 57n Homer 19, 22, 68, 160, 168–9, 173, 175, 179n;Hymns 175; Iliad 173, 174, 176;Odyssey 173, 175 Hone, William 123, 197n; Apocryphal New Testament 188; The Political House that Jack Built 124 Hook, Theodore 150 Horace 65, 160, 179n Horsemonger Lane Gaol: see under Hunt, James Henry Leigh: Life Hough, Graham 119 Houtchens, Carolyn Washburn 12 Houtchens, Lawrence Huston 12 Howard, Henry: Earl of Surrey 56n Howe, P.P. 197n Hume, David 110, 112, 201 Hunt, Henry 217–18 Hunt, James Henry Leigh: Life: appearance 215, 219, 228; book giving 27–8; career overview 1–11;

Index Catholicism, criticism of 25; cheerfulness 67, 142, 173, 178, 221; children 190; at Christ’s Hospital 19–31; and Clarke, Charles Cowden 32–57; classical drama, ignorance of 125; classical languages 22, 27, 28, 163–4; clothes 46; commercial acuity 10; conversation, animated in 152; conversational and social manner 215, 218–19, 221–2, 226–7; copy of Lamia cremated with Shelley 229; correspondence 11, 12, 13, 32, 35–43, 45–51, 99–100, 218 (see also letters); death 11, 219;domesticity, cult of 83–4; dramatic intelligence 24–5, 99, 215, 222; early influences and reading 26–8; early life 13, 19–31; editor xvi, 1, 2, 7, 34–5, 59, 121; education 1, 13, 19–28; England, returns to from Italy 8; Examiner, ownership of 8 (see also under newspapers and periodicals); family 2, 7, 25, 27, 99, 190; feminism 181; financial help, attitude to 220–1; fined 3; flair for décor 225; flirting 21; Gifford, William: mutual disgust 180–97; gothic, attitude to 97–8; government pension 9, 223, 228; grave, epitaph on 214; Greek drama, ignorance of 125; handwriting 215; ‘Harry Brown’ persona 64, 137, 139; health and invalidism 21, 28, 35, 36, 39, 45–6, 142; heights, fear of 215; heterosexual affection 24, 26; homes 15, 41, 42, 45, 46, 226, 231n; homosexuality 24; Horsemonger Lane Gaol, in 3, 4, 14, 15, 17n, 19, 29–30, 32, 36–41, 43, 53, 57n, 64, 66, 95, 96, 97, 98, 105–6, 107, 121, 125, 128, 130, 134n, 166, 185, 214, 218, 226–7; Horsemonger Lane Gaol, bower and furnishings in 3, 87, 90–1, 107, 125, 128, 130, 143, 218, 226 ; Horsemonger Lane Gaol, conditions in 226–7; Horsemonger Lane Gaol, garden and dairy produce in 3, 36, 38, 39, 40, 218; Horsemonger Lane Gaol, ‘Recollections’ of 17n.; Horsemonger Lane Gaol, release from 62, 222; Hunt, Henry: mistaken for 217–18; idealism 26; idealistic friendships 13, 24; impulse, poetry of 155n; intimacy 95–117, 125, 164;

237

Italy, in and voyaging to 7–8, 109, 157, 189, 190, 232n; journalism 27; Keats, John: criticised by 53–4; Keats, John: influence on 118–34; kisses, shapes of 109–11; lampooned as ‘actor’ 190; later career 15; ‘Libertas’ in Keats’s Specimen 129; library 17n; martyrdom, spirit of 24–5, 97; military flogging, criticism of 3; Minerva Library, subscription to 27; misprint in poem, reaction to 202–3; money 7–8, 10, 16n, 28; mountains, dislikes 215; musical interests 13, 33, 35, 51, 55n, 61, 62, 95, 206, 209–10, 215, 219 (see also Haydn; Mozart); opinions 215; parents 25, 27; personality 15, 218–19; portrait xvi; quality of mind 221–2; racial origins 121; recollections of 10–11, 214–32; religious thought 15, 198–213, 214, 221; revolutionary 1790s 24; self-ironizing 150; sexual impurity, charges of 43; Shelley’s funeral 229; sociability and visiting 61, 99, 168, 171, 172, 218–19; social order, reimagining the 128–9, 130; stammering 21, 22; studio 12, 14; study 215, 226; in Surrey Gaol see Horsemonger Lane Gaol; synagogue visits 25; theatre 15, 229; unitarianism 25; Vale of Health 12, 14, 91–2n, 217; violence 13, 19–20, 22–3, 26; voice 215; voyeurism, juvenile and adult 26, 83; vulgarity 99, 105, 110, 115, 119, 127, 185, 190; Wordsworth’s reputation, helps establish 3–5; Writings: (see also under newspapers and periodicals) A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla 216; A Legend of Florence 9; ‘A Now, Descriptive of a Hot Day’ 12, 166–7; ‘A Thought on Music’ 179n ; Autobiography 1, 2, 8, 9, 19, 24, 25, 27, 30, 141–2, 143, 150, 180, 181, 184, 194–5, 196n, 198, 206–7, 217, 219, 228, 229; ‘Abraham and the Fire Worshipper’ 206; ‘Answer to the Question “What Is Poetry?”’ 137, 144–5; ‘Apollo and the Sunbeams’ 202–3; ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ 48, 56n, 135–6; ‘Bacchus, or the Pirates’ 164;Captain Sword and Captain Pen 8–9, 11, 143; Christianism

238

Index

7, 15, 24, 199; ‘Christ’s Hospital’ 19, 29; Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres 2, 4, 180, 222; Descent of Liberty: A Mask 14, 39, 41, 55n, 165; ‘Description of Hampstead’ 147, 172; ‘El Cid’ (projected tragedy) 50–1, 54n, 56–7n; ‘Elegy on the Death of Bion’ 176; Eloisa and Abelard story 116n; Fairy King 28; ‘Fancy’s Party. A Fragment’ 146, 157–8, 165–8, 170–1, 173; Feast of the Poets 3–5, 14, 55n, 64, 95–6, 134n, 136, 148–50, 156, 160–4, 165, 180–4, 189, 191, 195n, 196n; fireside essays 98; Foliage 2, 3, 8, (1818) 13, 14–15, 53, 58–77, 81, 124, 159, 160, 165–78, 186, 187, 190, 191, 192, 196n, 197n, 224, 227; ‘Godiva’ 48, 56n, 110, 112–15; ‘Harry Brown to his Cousin Thomas Brown, Jun.’ 64, 137–8; ‘Harry Brown’s Letters to his Friends’ 64, 139; ‘Hero and Leander’ 48, 56n; ‘I and We’ 146; Imagination and Fancy 9; ‘It lies before me there’ 102–3; Juvenilia 1, 2, 9, 13, 28, 75n, 96; ‘Letters from Abroad’ 7, 17n; ‘Letters to the Readers of the Examiner’ 189; ‘Life and Letters of Madame de Sévigné’ 203; Literary Pocket-Book 10, 50, 52, 56n, 57n; Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries 9, 82, 167–8, 194, 197n; ‘Macbeth; or, The Ill Effects of Ambition’ 28; ‘Memoir of Mr. James Henry Leigh Hunt’ xvi, 9; ‘Miscellaneous Sketches’ 134n; ‘Mr. Hazlitt and the Utilitarians’ 140; ‘Mrs Jordan’ 116n; narrative poems 83; ‘National Song’ 179n; ‘On Death and Burial’ 103; ‘On the Degrading Notions of Deity’ 62, 66, 198; ‘On the Latin Poems of Milton’ 155n; ‘On the New Poet Laureate’ 64; ‘On the Nile’ 62; Poetical Works (1832) 8, 10, 96, 148, 223, 229–30; Poetical Works (1923) 11; ‘Politics and Poetics’ 3, 64, 143–4, 179n; ‘Power and Gentleness’ 57n; ‘Quiet Evenings’ 146–7; Readings for Railways 10; ‘Recollections & Memorandums written during my imprisonment in Surrey Jail’ (MS) 17n; ‘Reflections of a Dead Body’ 15, 206–12;Religion of the Heart 7, 12, 15,

24, 198–9, 221; ‘Remembered Friendship’ 13, 28–9; ‘Rondeau’ (Nelly/Jenny Kissed Me) 12, 14, 102; ‘Roses’ 177;Round Table 60, 83, 98, 103, 185–6, 221; ‘Song’ 179n; ‘Specimens of a Dictionary of Love and Beauty’ 110; ‘Specimens of British Poetesses’ 12; ‘The Bitter Gourd’ 199, 208; ‘The “Choice”’, ‘The Dance’ 176; 153; ‘The Lover’ 176; ‘The Nymphs’ 12, 13, 65, 68–75, 76n, 82–3, 144, 168, 169–71, 193; ‘The Nymphs of Antiquity and of the Poets’ 77n; ‘The Rural Concert’ 176; ‘The Seat Under the Tree’ 177; ‘The Shewe of Faire Seeming’ 203–4; The Story of Rimini 1, 3, 5–7, 12, 14, 15, 32, 35, 43, 52, 56n, 59, 60, 62, 78, 82, 83, 87–91, 95, 99, 104–9, 118–19, 121, 124, 125–9, 130, 132n, 134n, 141–2, 150–3, 167, 181, 184–5, 192, 193, 196n, 214, 215–16, 224, 226; ‘The Summer of 1818’ 57n; ‘The Teacher Taught’ 176; ‘The Town’ 216; theatre criticism 2, 6, 12, 25, 222, 224; Thor 28; ‘To a Spider Running across a Room’ 141, 181, 190, 191; ‘To Benjamin Robert Haydon’ 46, 56n; ‘To Henry Robertson, John Gattie, and Vincent Novello’ 54n, 62; ‘To Horatio Smith’ 62; ‘To John Hamilton Reynolds’ 62; ‘To Lord Byron’ 99; ‘To T_____ B_____, ESQ. Written from Hampstead’ 179n; ‘To the Grasshopper and the Cricket’ 62; ‘To Thomas Moore’ [‘Harry Brown to His Cousin Thomas Brown, Jun. Letter 1’] 14; ‘To T.L.H. Six years old, during a sickness’ 103; ‘To T.M.Alsager Esq.’ 179n; ‘To William Hazlitt’ 140–1, 171–2; translations 13, 48, 60, 68, 100, 160, 163–6, 168–9, 173–8, 224; Ultra-Crepidarius 8, 15, 63, 180, 181, 190–5; ‘William Tell’ (projected poem) 48, 56n; Winter 28; ‘Wishing-Cap Essays’ 8, 31n, 100, 101, 104; ‘Young Poets’ 60, 63, 65, 67 Hunt, Isaac (father of LH) 98, 75n, 135, 228; The Rights of Englishmen 25 Hunt, Jacintha (daughter of LH) 217 Hunt, John (brother of LH) 2, 3, 8, 16-l7n, 36, 40, 64, 66, 125, 189, 195–6n, 225

Index Hunt, Marianne (Mary Ann Kent, wife of LH) 30, 34, 36, 38, 41, 43, 46, 47, 157, 165, 172, 217, 224 Hunt, Mary (Mary Shewell, mother of LH) 118–34 Hunt, Swinburne (son of LH) 227 Hunt, Thornton (eldest son of LH) 12, 16n, 219, 220 Hunter, Anne 206–7, 209 Hunter, John 113 Hunter, Rowland 42, 43 Hutchinson, Sara 20 Inchbald, Elizabeth 27 Iowa University: see University of Iowa Libraries Irving, Washington 229 Jack, Ian 10 Jackson, John xvi jargon 6, 14, 120, 122, 127, 129, 131, 185; see also under Cockney Jeffrey, Francis 10, 97 Johnson, Joseph 28, 42, 59 Johnson, Samuel 27, 99–100, 122, 123, 217, 223 Jones, Elizabeth x, 6, 13–14, 29, 71–2, 78–94, 166 Jones, F.L. 197n Jones, Gareth Stedman 122 Jones, Howard Mumford 64 Jones, Steven 133–4n, 181, 196n Jordan, Mrs [Dora] 116n judges 226 ‘Junius’ 38, 39, 55n; see also Glover, Richard Juvenal 181, 183, 184, 191 Keach, William 119, 120, 131n, 196n Kean, Charles 222 Kean, Edmund 2, 57n, 218, 222–3 Keats and History 13, 120 Keats: Bicentenary Readings 13 Keats, George 56n, 138 Keats, John 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 25, 27, 29–30, 32–3, 34, 35, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 56n, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76n, 83, 84, 86–7, 89, 91–2n, 102, 103, 106, 113, 117n, 118–34, 135, 136, 147–8, 149, 152, 154n, 156–9, 166, 170, 175, 179n, 184, 187, 189, 190, 207–8, 223, 224, 226;

239

accommodation 86–7; bicentenary 13; Bicentennial Keats Conference 120; criticism of LH 53–4, 56n; Fanny Brawne, and 29, 157; first poems 53; imprisonment theme 115n; ‘Junkets’ nickname 47, 49; negative capability 77; poetic richness 134n; political thinker 130; soul-making 29, 30, 31n; suffering and death 51, 202, 212; unknown youth 214, 221; Wentworth Place 29, 86–7, 92n, 93n; Works: Calidore: A Fragment 121, 129–30, 131, 134n; Endymion 53, 67, 69, 71, 74, 159, 184, 187; ‘Fancy’ 77n; ‘Give me women, wine and snuff’ 120, 132n; ‘Human Seasons’ 57; Hyperion 131n, 159, 211; ‘I stood tiptoe upon a little hill’ 69, 71, 120; Isabella 136; Lamia 130, 131, 134n, 158–9; LH’s copy of 229; ‘O Solitude’ 53; ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ 76n, 103, 142, 207–8, 211; ‘Ode on Indolence’ 12, 87, 130; ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 76n, 87, 117n; ‘Ode to Psyche’ 13, 29, 30, 87; ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ 58, 59; ‘On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair’ 102; ‘On the Nile’ (with LH and Shelley) 62; ‘On The Story of Rimini’ 129; Poems (1817) 53, 57n, 60, 62, 80, 81, 131n, 142–3, 179n; ‘Sleep and Poetry’ 62, 68, 142, 147–8; ‘Sonnet to Ailsa Crag’ 57n; Specimen of an Induction to a Poem 121, 129, 134n; The Eve of St. Agnes 9, 87, 113, 130, 134n; The Fall of Hyperion 135; The Jealousies 130; ‘To Charles Cowden Clarke’ 53; ‘To My Brother George’ (epistle) 138, 154n; ‘To My Brother George’ (sonnet) 138; ‘To the Grasshopper and the Cricket’ 62 Keats, Tom 51, 52, 57n, 134n Kemble, John Philip 2 Kent, Elizabeth (‘Bessy’, sister-in-law of LH) 69, 89, 109–11;Flora Domestica 89 Kosciusko, Tadeusz 62 Kucich, Greg x–xi, 14, 110, 118–34 La Fontaine, Augustus 28 Lady Godiva legend 14, 48, 56n Lamb, Charles 3, 19, 60, 61, 62–3, 168, 191, 197n, 225, 229; ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’ 19; ‘To the Author of Poems

240

Index

Published under the Name of Barry Cornwall’ 60 Lamb, Mary 125 Lancaster, Joseph 55n Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (LEL) 97 Landor, Walter Savage 8 Landré, Louis 141; Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) 11 landscape, aesthetics of 84–8; see also gardenesque Larkin, Philip 103, 107 ‘Laura Maria’: see Robinson, Mary Lawrence, D.H. 152–3 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 200, 212 Lemprière, John: Classical Dictionary 26–7, 29 letters 7, 12, 13, 32–57, 67, 72–3, 77n, 99–100, 109–10, 156–8, 195n, 197n, 203, 215–16, 216–17, 219, 220–1, 223, 227–8, 229–30 Levertov, Denise 158, 161 Levine, Philip 179n Levinson, Marjorie 119 Liverpool 59 Lockhart, John 5–6, 78, 194; see also ‘Z’; North, Christopher London 1, 8, 25, 32, 79, 81–2, 83, 122, 124, 132n, 133n, 162, 215, 216, 228 (see also suburbs); Bond Street 113; book trade (publishing and selling) 25, 28, 44, 45, 53; Bow Bells 118, 122, 124, 132n; Camberwell 81, 84; Chelsea 216, 227; Cockney identity and usage 14, 118–34; Covent Garden theatre 34, 35, 57n, 61; Cripplegate 79; Drury Lane theatre 54n, 57n, 229; Great Plague 81; Hammersmith 12, 24, 224; Hampstead 1, 12, 41, 42, 45, 46, 61–2, 65, 81, 84, 91–2n, 96, 150, 165, 172, 179n, 186, 217, 226, 231n; Hampstead Heath 53, 63; Highgate 1, 12, 81, 92n; Kensal Green Cemetery 214; Leadenhall Street 27; margins of 91;New Road 46, 225–6, 231 n; Paddington 41, 48; Paternoster Row 25, 55n; Primrose Hill 90; Regent’s Park 46, 90; ‘rookeries’ 79, 81; St Giles-in-the-Fields 81; St Paul’s Churchyard 25, 28, 42, 43; Serpentine 92n; stage 2, 4, 54n; Tate Gallery 1; Thames 24; Tottenham Court Road 43; Vauxhall 81, 83;

Westminster School 33–4; Wimbledon Common 214, 228 Loudon, John Claudius 14, 84–5, 87, 88, 93n; Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion 87 Lowth, Bishop 123 Lucian 155n Lucretius 66–7 Lytton, Edward Bulwer: Godolphin 72; Rienzi, The Last of the Tribunes 77n Macaulay, Thomas 9, 11, 223 MacCarthy, Desmond 229, 232n McGann, Jerome 12, 119 Macready, William 215 Magnuson, Paul 153n Mallett’s Northern Antiquities 28 Malthus, Thomas 201, 212 Manilius 165–6 Marmion, Shackerley 79 Marshall, W.C. 113 Martineau, Harriet 201 Marvell, Andrew 152, 155n Mason, John 33 Mason, Michael 145 Massinger, Philip 79 Mathew, George Felton 80 Matlak, Richard 12 Matthews, W. 133n Medwin, Thomas 69, 190 Mellor, Anne K. 12 mental theatre 2, 3, 6 Miller, Barnette 119 Milnes, Richard Monckton 9 Milton, John 4, 27, 41, 62, 65, 70, 75n, 97, 102–3, 124, 125, 155n, 158, 165, 172, 226; Comus 170; ‘L’Allegro’ 170; ‘Lycidas’ 143; Paradise Lost 194; ‘Song on May Morning’ 41, 55n Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel 66 Mitchell, Thomas 24 Mitford, Mary Russell 7, 215–16, 223–4 Mitzukoshi, Ayumi 13 modernism/ist poetry 9, 11, 168 Moir, David MacBeth 214, 224 Monkhouse, Cosmo 198 Moore, Thomas 3, 63, 64, 65, 68, 75, 95, 98, 125, 137, 139, 168, 171, 176, 218, 226; Intercepted Letters or the Twopenny Post Bag 64, 137; Lalla Rookh 63, 74; Life of Lord Byron 194; The Fudge Family in Paris 64, 75n, 139 Morley, Henry 224–5

Index Morton, Timothy 175 Moschus 68, 176 Mozart 33, 35, 40–1, 55n, 61, 156, 157; Cosi fan Tutte 40, 55n, 200, 201; Don Giovanni 40, 55n, 56n; II Barbiere di Siviglia 206; La Climenza di Tito 40, 55n, 56n; Le Nozze di Figaro 40, 55n Mulgrave, Lord 10 Murray, John 5, 181, 184, 189, 191, 194, 195n, 196n Napoleon Bonaparte 67, 104, 124 Nash, John 90 nature 70–1, 73–4, 78; see also gardenesque;picturesque New Historicist Romantic studies 12 newspapers and periodicals 2, 24, 133n; Amulet 221; Anti-Jacobin 181; Athenaeum 223; Augustan Review 99, 104–5, 106; Blackwood’s [Edinburgh] Magazine 5, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 68, 71, 78, 82, 87, 93n, 104, 113, 119, 158, 165, 172, 180, 181, 186, 189, 190, 193, 197n, 224; Boston Weekly Messenger 196n; British Critic 71, 96, 193; British Lady’s Magazine 104, 105; Church of England Quarterly Review 113; Companion (ed. LH) 8; Court Magazine (LH contributor) 8; Critical Review 97; Dublin Examiner 104, 105; Eclectic Review 5, 66, 76n, 104, 105, 106; Edinburgh Review 5, 55n, 104, 105, 196n; Examiner (ed. LH) xvi, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 13, 25, 26, 34–5, 38, 41, 45, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56n, 59, 60, 61, 64, 68, 70, 121, 124, 125, 134n, 137, 138, 139, 140, 181, 186, 188–9, 195n, 221, 222, 226, 227; Galignani’s Messenger 226; Gardener’s Magazine 85;Household Words 224; Indicator (ed. LH) 7, 83, 90, 98, 110, 112, 158, 166–7, 226; Leigh Hunt’s London Journal 8; Liberal (LH contributor) 7, 64, 181, 189, 190, 191, 197n, 221; Literary Examiner (LH contributor) 8; Literary Panorama 104, 105; London Magazine 80–; Metropolitan 226; Monthly Chronicle (LH contributor) 8; Monthly Mirror xvi, 9; Monthly Review 104, 105; Morning Chronicle 195n;New Monthly Magazine 10, 56n, 115, 203, 221, 225, 226; New Statesman 232n;

241

Political Register 124; Quarterly Review 43, 55n, 66, 67, 82, 104, 180–97; ‘Quarterly Review Project’ website 195n; Reflector (ed. LH) 16n, 161, 196n; Scots Magazine 138–9; Spectator 28, 228; Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (LH contributor) 8, 9, 96–7, 101; Tatler (ed. LH) 8; The Times 24, 60, 61, 218; ‘The Wonderful Magazine’ 28, 54; True Sun (LH contributor) 8; Westminster Gazette 227–8 Newton, Sir Isaac 199, 201–2, 205–6 Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue 43 North, Christopher 5–6; see also ‘Z’; Lockhart, John Novello, Mary Sabilla 8, 218 Novello, Vincent 48, 49, 54n, 55n, 61, 62, 156, 206, 209, 218 Novello-Clarke Collection 32, 35, 43, 51, 54, 55n nursery rhymes 1 nympholepsy 72, 74, 110 O’Neill, Michael xi, 6, 10, 14, 135–55 Ollier, Charles 32, 40, 52, 61, 197n Ollier, John 34–5, 45, 53, 57n Olson, Charles 158, 161, 166 opera 34, 40–1, 48, 55n, 56n Otto, Peter 153n Ovid 22, 69 Owen, Wilfred 9 Paganini 215 Paine, Thomas 7, 25, 59, 124 Palgrave’s Golden Treasury 152 pamphlets and broadsides 25, 26, 28, 43–5, 57n, 189–90 (see also newspapers and periodicals); The Illiberal!! Verse and Prose from the North!! 189–90; The Rights of Englishmen 25 (see also Hunt, Isaac) Papendieck, Frederick 24 Pater, Walter 210 Patmore, P.G. 214, 225 Paulin, Tom 140, 153n Pausanias 73 Peacock, Thomas Love 72, 76n; Rhododaphne 69, 71, 74 pedagogical systems 55n Pegge, Samuel 122 Pepys, Samuel 81 Perkins, David 100 Perry, Seamus 137

242

Index

picturesque 84–6; see also gardenesque Pitt, William (Lord Chatham) 38, 55n, 228 Plato 34 Poet Laureate/ship 1, 15, 160, 198, 228, 230 poetic/artistic schools and styles 59, 67, 70–1, 78, 80, 84, 110, 142, 158, 181, 183, 214; see also Cockney School poetics: theory, form, practice 9, 156–79; accent 174;allegory 129, 131; alliteration 138, 174; ambience 175; Anacreontics 120, 171; anapaestics 134n, 149, 160, 161, 171, 194; archaism 174; ballad 145; bathos 129, 149; blank verse 160, 161, 173, 174; cadence 141; caesura 174; camp 192; ‘cinematic’ techniques/effects 106, 146; close reading 9, 14, 137, 156; closure 152; collaboration 60, 61, 62; colloquialism 134n; comic accent 139; confessional verse 96; congeniality 160; conversation poems 98, 144; counterpoetics 156–79; couplets 119, 125, 141, 149, 151, 152, 158–9, 160, 161, 166, 170, 193, 194; dactyls 161; decasyllabics 170; decorum 152, 170; dedications 60; diction 43, 105, 106, 150, 174, 185, 224; digression 100; dimeters 166; dirge 176; doggerel 132n; dramatic monologue 15, 98, 106, 209; echoes 209; elegy 140, 143, 152, 156, 158, 176; end-stopping 150, 152; enjambement 136, 142, 152, 174; epic 34, 53, 55n, 135, 173–4; epigram 199; epyllion 154n; etymology 208; excess 14, 112, 118–34, 162, 167–8; expressive theory of metre 100, 116n; fable 201; familiar style 144; fancy 14–15, 77n, 156–79; feminine rhyme 136, 137, 166; free indirect discourse 139; genre 148, 153, 165, 182; homily 144; iambics 194; immaturity 168–73, 179n; improvising/ extempore 148, 150, 152, 153n; inclusiveness 162, 163, 172; initials/ pseudonyms/personae/ anonymity 60, 64, 73–4, 181, 189, 195; intransitive verbs 170; irony 129, 150; jargon: see under Cockney; lampoon 186, 189; lyric 156, 167, 168, 175, 176; metre 137, 161, 193,

196n; mock epic 135; narrative verse 160; occasional verse 60, 64–5, 168, 171, 173, 224; octosyllabics 170; odes 157, 159; open and closed form 156, 161; originality 135, 153n, 173; parataxis 170; parody 14, 124, 127, 129, 130, 134n, 139–40, 192; pastiche 145, 148; pastoral 143, 173, 176; pathos 150; performance 146, 148, 150; poetry contests 62, 69–70; ‘primitive’ poetry, taste for 19; process of composition 135, 138, 153; prolepsis 136; pronouns 146; prose poem 12; protest 8–9; punning 156, 157, 228; quest romance 129; reclining poet topos 171; rhetoric, anadiplosis 211; rhetoric, aposiopesis 210; rhetoric, enumeratio 170; rhetoric, occupatio 137–8, 154n; rhetoric, pleonasm 210; rhyme 118, 120, 127, 129, 131n 142, 152, 161, 166, 171, 177, 193; rhyming slang 123, 133n; rhythm 193; run-on lines 119, 120, 127; satire 3, 8, 15, 61, 63, 64–5, 100, 133n, 134n, 139–40, 148, 180–1, 182, 190, 191–5; satire, Juvenalian 181, 191; satire, Lucianic 155n; slang 132n, 136, 152; sonnet 12, 34, 46, 51–2, 53, 54n, 57n, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 70, 72, 75n, 84, 102–3, 104, 132n, 146–7, 162, 164, 168, 170–3, 177, 179n, 198; speech registers 125–7, 150; spontaneity 14, 135–55; stanza 149; subtitles 62; surprise 100; Symbolist poetry 100; syntax 152, 174, 185; tetrameters 161, 165, 171; tonality 150; translation: see under Hunt, James Henry Leigh, Writings;trochaics 102; variety in uniformity 137; vatic, the 168; vernacular 27, 122–3, 124 (see also Cockney; jargon); verse epistle 53, 60, 62–3, 64, 65, 69, 137, 139–40, 141, 168, 170–3, 194; versification 105, 124, 125, 137, 147–8, 149, 158, 160, 161, 185, 193; words and ideas/ thought 153n, 161 Pope, Alexander 2, 28, 124, 125, 149, 165, 194; An Essay on Man 201; Dunciad 194; ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ 194; epitaph for Newton 199; translation of Homer 173, 175 Pound, Ezra 11

Index Powell, John 34, 36–7, 54n Priestley, Joseph 123 Priestman, Martin 198 Prince of Wales 3, 181, 194; see also Robinson, Mary;Prince Regent; Regency Prince Regent 59, 64, 65, 125, 184, 218, 222; see also Prince of Wales; Regency Procter, Brian Waller (‘Barry Cornwall’) 51, 57n, 225–6, 228, 231n prospect genre 86 prostitution 14, 81–2 public school system 27 Pulci, Luigi 125 Purcell, Henry 61 ‘Q’: ‘The Three Asses.—Wm. Gifford’ 189, 197n; see also Fonblanque, Albany Queen Victoria 9, 198 radicalism 100, 134n, 153, 185, 198, 214, 217–18, 228 Raphael 62 Redding, Cyrus 3, 15, 99, 214, 226–7 Regency 14, 89, 90, 99, 118, 132n, 165; house and garden design 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 125; see also Prince of Wales; Prince Regent Regent: see Prince Regent Reiman, Donald 12, 185, 196n Repton, Humphry 85 reviews 1, 9, 34, 43–5, 55n, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 72, 78, 82, 85, 96, 97, 104–5, 113, 114, 116n, 118, 124, 138, 142–3, 158, 165–6, 167, 172, 179n, 180–97 Reynolds, John Hamilton 58, 60, 62; Naiad 69; ‘Romance of Youth’ 69 Richards, Charles 38, 57n Richards, George 19 Richards, Thomas 34, 51, 54n, 57n Richardson, Samuel 28 Ricks, Christopher 115n Robertson, Henry 47, 49, 54n, 61, 62 Robertson, John 34 Robinson, Jeffrey xi, 13, 14–15, 156–79 Robinson, Mary 181–4, 187, 188, 189, 191, 194, 196n; contributor (‘Laura Maria’) to The World 181, 183; lameness 184, 188, 189, 191; mistress to Prince of Wales 181, 184, 188, 191, 194; portrait 182

243

Roe, Nicholas xi, 1–31, 87, 119–120, 197n,214–32 Rogers, Samuel 75n Roscoe, William 59 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 1, 11, 17n, 214 Rossetti, William Michael 12, 17n, 227 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 97 Ruskin, John 77n, 92n, 93n Russell, James 185 St Paul 12, 21, 36, 51–2, 202, 204, 208; see also Greek New Testament Scattergood, John 79 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von 174 Schubert, Franz Peter 209–10 Scott, John 195n Scott, Walter 96, 151 Scott, William Bell 214, 227 Seneca 24, 179n Severn, Joseph 87 Sgricci, Tomasso 150 Shakespeare, William 2, 27, 28, 65, 75n, 97, 125, 165, 209, 226; Hamlet 2, 28, 209; Macbeth 2; Measure for Measure 209; Richard III 222; The Tempest 170, 211; Timon of Athens 218 Sharp, Ronald 123 Shaw, George Bernard: Captain Brassbound’s Conversion 132–3n; The Simplified Spelling Reform 134n Shelley, Mary 7, 8, 56n, 60, 70, 73, 96, 187, 204–5; Frankenstein 73 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1, 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16n, 24, 27, 34, 48, 49, 51, 52, 56n, 57n, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75–6n, 96, 104, 106, 140–1, 144, 149, 150, 152, 167– 8, 184, 186, 187–8, 189, 190, 197n, 198, 204–5, 206–7, 226; correspondence 197n; death and cremation 7, 103, 229, 232n; Eton College 27; son William’s suffering and death 198, 202, 204, 212; Works: A Defence of Poetry 148; Adonais 64, 68, 189; ‘Alastor’ 71; Julian and Maddalo 144; ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ 141, 144; ‘Marianne’s Dream’ 57n; ‘On the Nile’ 62; Peter Bell the Third 73, 75–6n; Prometheus Unbound 188, 189; The Cenci 60;‘The Cloud’ 76n; The Masque of Anarchy 9; The Revolt of Islam

244

Index

[Laon and Cythna] 67, 69, 74, 106, 187–8 Shenstone, William 127 Siddons, Sarah 2 Siversten, Eva 133n, 134n Smith, Adam 201 Smith, Charlotte 12, 96 Smith, George 220–1 Smith, Horace (Horatio) 60, 61, 68, 72, 226; Amarynthus the Nympholept 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 76n; Rejected Addresses 61; ‘To Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq. on His Poems’ 60 Smith, Olivia 123, 124, 133n Smith & Elder (publishers) 216 Smollett, Tobias 28 social degradation 14 Socrates 221 Southey, Robert 8,10, 63, 160, 190, 230; The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo 70 Spence, Joseph: Polymetis 26–7 Spence, Thomas 123 Spenser, Edmund 2, 3, 4, 9, 27, 65, 99, 124, 127, 129, 165, 225;Faerie Queene 28, 129, 226 Stabler, Jane xi, 14, 95–117 Story, William Wetmore 220 Stothard, Thomas 75n Stout, George Dumas 11 Stow, John 79 sublime 12, 72, 90, 148 subscriptions 2, 10, 96, 223, 229–30 suburbs 6, 13–14, 29, 78–94 Surr, Thomas Skinner 19 Surrealism 167 Surrey Gaol: see Horsemonger Lane Gaol under Hunt, James Henry Leigh: Life Swift, Jonathan 104, 141 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 11, 66, 69, 214, 221, 227–8; ‘A Nympholept’ 69 Swinburne, Sir John Edward 66, 69, 227 Talfourd, Thomas Noon 203 Tasso, Torquato 60 Tatchell, Molly: Leigh Hunt and his Family in Hammersmith 12 taxidermy 90 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 1, 11, 14, 113–14, 205, 212, 228; In Memoriam 205; Poems (1842) 113–14;‘The Princess’ 209 Terence 22

Thackeray, William Makepeace 214, 228 Thelwall, John 214, 228 Theocritus 48, 168–9, 173; Idylls 174; ‘The Lover’ 176;The Rural Concert’ 176 Thomas, Edward 11 Thompson, James R. 12, 74 Thomson, James 2, 27; Seasons 27, 28 Thorpe, Clarence DeWitt 146 Ticknor, George 228–9 Tighe, Mary 12 Tooke, Andrew: The Pantheon 26–7, 29 Tooke, John Home 135, 153n, 214, 228; The Diversions of Purley 123, 153n Tory/ism/critics 15, 25, 64, 78, 81, 100, 118, 124, 180–97 Townsend, George 19 Unitarianism 206, 221 University of Iowa Libraries xvi, 38 Utilitarianism 140 vegetarianism 74 vernacular: see under poetry Victorians 8, 14, 23, 33, 69, 89, 97, 110, 195 Virgil 22, 34, 86, 209; Aeneid IV 34, Aeneid VI 207 Volney, Constantin comte de 199 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet 200–1 Wakefield, Gilbert 33 Walker, John 122, 132n Waterloo, Battle of 124 Webb, Cornelius 60 Webb, Timothy 195n Wells, J.C. 132n West London Lancastrian Society Association 55n Wheatley, Kim xi, 15, 91, 180–97 Whigs 64, 100 White, Gilbert 55n White, Holt 38, 39, 55n Whitman, Walt 136 Wilkes, John 66 Williams, W.S. 216 Williams, William Carlos 138, 158 Wilson, John 97 Wise, Thomas J. 189 Wollstonecraft, Mary 25, 59 women: cross-dressing 116n; readers, supervision of 105; writers 1, 7, 10,

Index 11, 12, 15, 27, 32, 33, 52, 54n, 55n, 77n, 160, 181–4, 187, 188, 189, 191, 194, 196n, 199, 201, 206–7, 209, 214, 215–16, 218–19, 223–4, 229 Wood, John 24 Woodfall, H.S. 39 Woodhouse, Richard 5 Woodring, Carl 99 Wooler, T.J.: The Black Dwarf 124, 133–4n Woolf, Virginia 11, 15, 214, 229 Wordsworth, Dorothy 84, 85 Wordsworth, William 1, 2, 3–5, 6, 10, 12, 14, 72, 73, 74–5, 78, 85–6, 95, 106, 107, 145–6, 148, 150, 153n, 156, 157, 160, 161–5, 168, 169, 172, 175, 178, 179n, 215, 228, 229–30; devastating reviews of 1; reputation, LH furthers 3–5; scruples about LH 229–30; Works: ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ 177; Guide through the District of the Lakes 85–6;

245

Home at Grasmere 85; London sonnets 162; ‘Lucy’ poems 162; Lyrical Ballads 4, 6, 96, 106, 123, 145–6; ‘Ode to Duty’ 162; ‘Personal Talk’ 98; Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) 1; Poems by William Wordsworth (1815) 160; The Excursion, 5, 6, 69–71, 72, 74, 76n, 96, 160; ‘The Female Vagrant’ 162; ‘The Mad Mother’ 145 Wu, Duncan 12 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 56n Wycherley, William 81 Yeats, W.B. 168 Young, Edward: Conjectures on Original Composition 135; Night Thoughts 27, 199 ‘Z’ 5–6, 7, 12, 13–14, 71, 78–84, 87–91, 92n, 93n, 104, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 127, 129, 134n, 181, 186, 196n; see also Lockhart, John; North, Christopher