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Biography
(BRITISH AND IRISH POETRY, REVISED EDITION)

James Henry Leigh Hunt was the son of a Philadelphia lawyer who had returned to England at the time of the
American Revolution. The father was a highly principled if rather impractical man who changed his profession
from lawyer to Unitarian minister and occasional tutor. At seven years of age, young Hunt was sent to school at
Christ’s Hospital, where Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had also been students. Hunt’s The Autobiography
of Leigh Hunt (1850) reveals that from his earliest years, he was instilled with a hatred of all that is evil. He
detested violence, was shocked by profane language, and opposed tyranny by defending his weaker
schoolmates with passive resistance of schoolyard bullies. Hunt stayed at Christ’s Hospital until he was fifteen.
At seventeen, he published a volume of juvenile verse.

In 1808, Hunt became the editor of a journal, The Examiner, owned by his brother John. The Examiner
championed a number of liberal causes: abolition of slavery, freedom of the press, an end to imprisonment for
debt. In their catalog of social evils, the Hunts did not hesitate to include even the Prince Regent of England.
Their description of the prince 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” resulted in a libel case and two years’ imprisonment for
both brothers. Prison was not very hard on Leigh Hunt. He had a decent room, which he decorated with
flowered wallpaper, and in which he received such notable visitors as Byron, Shelley, and Hazlitt. After his
release, Hunt published his major poem, The Story of Rimini, and became the literary mentor to young Keats.
The Tory critics, however, could not forgive the slandering of the prince and viciously attacked Hunt. In 1817,
Blackwood’s Magazine coined the term “cockney school” to describe Hunt’s frequently colloquial style, and the
appellation was to plague him for many years.

In 1822, Hunt and his family arrived in Italy. Shelley invited him to assume editorship of The Liberal, a
periodical conceived by Byron and Shelley as a vehicle for their own writings. Shelley drowned soon thereafter,
and when Byron, upon whom the Hunts had depended for financial support, left Italy, the family was stranded
until 1825, when Hunt borrowed enough money to return to England. He naturally felt that Byron had done him
an injustice, and in 1828, he published Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, presenting a most
unfavorable picture of Byron’s personal fears and dishonesties. Hunt maintained in the face of widespread
adverse criticism that he had included nothing that he did not believe to be entirely true. True or not, few
considered it proper to write so about a man who had recently gone to a heroic death.

With the exception of the embarrassment resulting from his identification with the character Harold Skimpole in
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852)—Dickens insisted that any similarity was unintentional—the remainder
of Hunt’s life was rather uneventful. He wrote voluminously in all literary forms and on countless topics. The
concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1965) estimates that a complete edition of his prose
works alone would fill forty volumes. He lived to see his liberal ideas become the popular thought of the day
and himself a respected figure in the literary community. Hunt’s productive life ended peacefully in 1859 while
he was visiting one of his oldest friends, the printer Charles Reynell, in Putney.

Biography
(GREAT AUTHORS OF WORLD LITERATURE, CRITICAL EDITION)

James Henry Leigh Hunt, editor, essayist, poet, and critic, was the youngest son of Isaac Hunt, a former student
and lawyer in Philadelphia, and of Mary Shewell Hunt, a kind-hearted, conscientious woman of Quaker
ancestry. Persecuted in revolutionary America for his loyalist views, Isaac Hunt had moved his family to
England, where he adopted liberal views and became a popular Unitarian preacher.

In 1792 Leigh Hunt was sent to Christ’s Hospital School,... /

(The entire section is 1,161 words.)