Hunt, (James Henry) Leigh

Hunt, (James Henry) Leigh (1784–1859), was educated at Christ's Hospital. His first collection of poems appeared in 1807. In 1808 he founded and edited, with his brother John (above), the Examiner, and in 1810 he edited the Reflector, in which he published Lamb's essays on Shakespeare and Hogarth. In 1813 he and his brother were fined £500 and sentenced to two years' imprisonment for a libel in the Examiner on the prince regent. While in jail he continued to write and edit the Examiner, and received visits from Byron, Moore, the Lambs, Bentham, James Mill, and Brougham. In 1816 he printed Keats's sonnet ‘O Solitude’ in the Examiner, and began his lifelong support of Keats, Shelley, and the Romantic poets; his name was linked with that of Keats and Hazlitt in attacks on the so-called Cockney school. Hunt's influential poem The Story of Rimini appeared in 1816; his verse collection Foliage in 1818; and in 1819 his poems Hero and Leander and Bacchus and Ariadne. In his journal the Indicator he published in 1821 Keats's ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, and in the Liberal, founded jointly with Byron, appeared The Vision of Judgement (1822). ‘Abou Ben Adhem’ (probably, with ‘Jenny kissed me’, Hunt's best-known poem) was published in an anthology, the Book of Gems (1838). His many other works include plays, Poetical Works (1844), a lively Autobiography (1850), and Table Talk (1851).

Hunt's essays, although much influenced by the essayists of the previous century, were not moral in intent. His aim was to convey appreciation and enjoyment, and his pleasure in literature, music, and drama (see theatre criticism). His gift for detecting talent, from Keats to Tennyson, and his determined support for it, made him an invaluable editor. His sunny, optimistic nature is sketched in the early character of Skimpole in Bleak House.