Biography: Two books about poet Leigh Hunt portray him as a radical whose life of continuous achievement spans two eras.
Leigh Hunt was the man on the beach who received Shelley's heart after the poet's body had been cremated at Viareggio. He engaged in sonnet-writing competitions with Keats. He published essays by Hazlitt and poems by Byron in periodicals established with his brother, John. Like Coleridge, he was a pupil at Christ's Hospital and was an intimate of Charles Lamb, another pupil. He breakfasted with Wordsworth and the painter, Benjamin Haydon. He wrote combatively on behalf of all the liberal causes of his time and against government corruption, spending for his pains two defiant years in Surrey Gaol. Here his cell became a bower, furnished with books on shelves with doilies, decorated with portraits and busts of literary personages and garlands of flowers. Here he received guests and was succoured by his wife's sister, who joined the family in a bohemian ménage à trois.
If you are addicted to old poetry anthologies, you may half-remember his name. You might have learned 'Abou Ben Adhem' at school or heard your elders recite 'Jenny Kiss'd Me'. Both poems had some currency for 150 years. Or again, if you wander down the aisles of a university library, you might notice a growing sequence of scholarly editions of Hunt's writings: collections of his literary criticism, opera criticism, dramatic criticism and letters; checklists of manuscript materials plus a comprehensive bibliography and several reference guides. There are separate critical studies in German and French, and a number of older lives. Two years ago, they were joined by a six-volume scholarly "selection" of Hunt's writings, published by Pickering and Chatto, which drew scattered materials together and annotated them according to modern standards, and also by a lively collection of specialised studies entitled Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics (Routledge).
The two books under review join the pile. Anthony Holden is a journalist turned writer and broadcaster who has previously written biographies of Prince Charles, Laurence Olivier, Tchaikovsky and Shakespeare. Nicholas Roe is a professor of English at the University of St Andrews who has published books on Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, and has a special interest in the culture of dissent among the second generation of Romantic writers. The new books are published on the same day, their packaging evidently hoping to capitalise on the current surge in Hunt's standing. They share the same epigraph, contain several identical illustrations, and acknowledge many of the same helpers. However, they make different use of the materials they share and will please different readers.
If you know nothing about Hunt and enjoy the fashion for biography, pick up The Wit in the Dungeon. Holden makes sure you know who everyone is at the time he introduces them, and tactfully reminds you when you have forgotten. He has a punchy style and a feeling for anecdote - entertaining you with details of Hunt's hair collection, for instance, which included locks from Milton and Napoleon, as well as Keats and Shelley. He keeps a complicated story moving, like a good host at a good party, and the story has an upbeat ending. You become acquainted with an energetic, sociable, misunderstood, path-breaking journalist whose time has come at long last.
Hunt emerges as a radical whose life of continuous achievement spans two eras. His earlier journalism and courageous opposition to the Prince Regent, Holden maintains, was obscured by the poets he befriended and championed. His later years among the Victorians was misleadingly caricatured by Dickens as the feckless, inconsequential Harold Skimpole of Bleak House, and his more literary writing forgotten. Holden rests his case primarily on the testimony of surrounding witnesses, who are remarkable for their number and variety. The ageing Haydon and Kingsley Amis join hands across the years to assure us what a sound fellow Hunt really was. A sentence of literary history from George Saintsbury and four pages in an anthology by Duncan Wu are cited to persuade us that Hunt's style is melodious and entertaining. The clouds of prejudice are finally dispersed - or would be, if life were a party in which misunderstanding was the only calamity.
Hunt's character involved selfless and selfish characteristics that were imbricated throughout his life. His story amounts to more than a narrative of early bravery, industry and reflected celebrity overtaken by misfortune, and then misrepresented by hostile contemporaries. The Wit in the Dungeon is a good read but it displaces too much of Hunt's story on to the supporting cast. It gives us the controversy that his poetry aroused in the reviews of the time - Hunt as the victim of prejudice - instead of explaining the new kind of poetry he hoped to write. Holden is persuasive in his claims for Hunt's journalism - quotes well in a way that bears out high claims for Hunt as a perceptive and original drama and musical critic - but avoids serious discussion of Hunt's verse. The omission makes his book easy to read on an aeroplane, and you pick up the buzz surrounding Hunt, but it is not a book one needs to read twice.
Fiery Heart, by contrast, concentrates on the first half of Hunt's life ("the first life" of the title) from 1784 to 1822 - the years when Hunt associated with names that have gone down in history - reckoning the remaining 37 years to be an "afterlife". It takes more for granted than The Wit in the Dungeon and might indeed have been improved by something like the helpful chronology and bibliography that Holden provides. That said, it brings forward much new material and provides substantial food for thought.
So, whereas Holden relies mainly on the resources of the London Library and the New York Public Library, Roe draws on unpublished records in Iowa and Barbados and Philadelphia that throw light on Hunt's family background. He explores the doubts and anxieties that co-existed deep within this ever-welcoming companion. His argument is about Hunt in general even though it concentrates on half of the story. Although the cast of surrounding characters is less brightly coloured, Roe's different focus provides insight into the singular mixture of qualities that commanded respect and derision. The argument on behalf of Hunt cuts deeper.
Fiery Heart explains why Hunt was taken seriously by other poets; that is, how his verse explored a modish and colloquial style in which odd cadences deliberately unsettle received ideas. What Roe says about Hunt's masterpiece, The Story of Rimini , is well-judged. One need not agree that Hunt is always in control of the effect he produces, but this question is the heart of the matter. We are told his poetry glows with sexual frankness, and it is true that it is frequently embarrassing. Contemporary critics labelled the feature "cockneyism", meaning that it possessed a dimension of risible bad taste. In more recent years the same feature in Keats has also been defended - for instance, by Christopher Ricks in his Keats and Embarrassment (1974). As a deliberate interrogation of agreed norms, a kind of punk subversion, it becomes a measure of honesty, a commendable virtue.
Producing wrong notes in order to question restrictive conventions of rightness is a strategy open to abuse and misinterpretation, but it is certainly continuous with the politics of Hunt's journalism. He was most effective as a writer and political activist because he neither respected confidences nor honoured debts to his friends. He dealt with issues as they arose, and used whatever he could lay his hands on without obligation, thereby offending allies such as Byron and Shelley as well as further enraging his enemies. Roe presents him as a man riven with contradictions, which he was, but his emotional life proceeded from moment to moment, evading resolution as if on principle, although principle is a less appropriate word than instinct. Virginia Woolf called Hunt "our spiritual grandfather", "a free man".
J.C.C. Mays is Emeritus Professor of English at UCD. His edition of Diarmuid and Grania, written by George Moore and W. B. Yeats in collaboration, will appear shortly from Cornell University Press
The Wit in the Dungeon: A Life of Leigh Hunt By Anthony Holden, Little, Brown, 430pp. £20
Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt, By Nicholas Roe, Pimlico, 428pp. £14.99