London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And today, October 19th, we’ve got one of those dates that seems to have decided to rhyme with itself.
October 19th, 1784.
Leigh Hunt is born.
And thirty-two years later – October 19th, 1816 –
a young John Keats comes up to Hampstead to meet him.
One October 19th gives us Leigh Hunt.
Another October 19th helps give John Keats his literary world.
That’s where we’re going.
But first, Philadelphia.
Yes.
Philadelphia.
Because before Leigh Hunt ever took a swing at the Prince Regent, his father had already demonstrated that the Hunts were not naturally gifted at keeping their opinions to themselves.
Isaac Hunt.
Lawyer.
Poet.
Cartoonist.
British loyalist in revolutionary America.
Very British loyalist.
So British loyalist, in fact, that during the American Revolution he narrowly avoided being tarred and feathered.
Just picture that.
Philadelphia.
Tempers high.
Revolution in the air.
And somebody is heating the tar.
Isaac Hunt gets out.
Barbados first.
Then London.
His family follows.
And in London he becomes a Church of England clergyman.
He preaches in Paddington.
He writes pamphlets.
He talks.
He drinks.
He smokes.
He gets into debt.
Frequently.
Money trouble is going to be a family refrain.
And into this lively, opinionated, financially chaotic household, on October 19th, 1784, comes James Henry Leigh Hunt.
Leigh Hunt.
Poet.
Journalist.
Critic.
Radical.
Friend of Keats.
Friend of Shelley.
Friend of Byron.
Friend of Lamb.
Friend of Dickens.
Friend of Carlyle.
And one of the great door-openers in English literary history.
Because Hunt’s own poems?
Some are lovely.
But that isn’t really why we remember him.
We remember him because talent came through his door.
And he recognised it.
But his childhood wasn’t easy.
Debt collectors.
Knocks at the door.
Illness.
Anxiety.
A stammer.
And one of Hunt’s earliest memories was of his own family being confined in the King’s Bench Prison for debt.
Think about that.
A little boy.
Prison.
Debt.
Locks.
The sound of doors being locked from the outside.
Then years later the grown man is going to hear prison doors closing behind him all over again.
And the reason?
He insulted the future king.
Excellent.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
Hunt goes to Christ’s Hospital.
Bright boy.
Nervous boy.
Bullied.
Not particularly brilliant at formal lessons.
He joked that his grammar book always seemed to open at the same page.
But he read.
Good heavens, did he read.
His first book?
Paradise Lost.
That’s setting the bar fairly high.
And he had this quality that stayed with him for life.
He might be anxious on his own behalf.
But when a friend or a good cause needed defending, something stiffened in him.
That matters.
Because now we come to The Examiner.
Leigh Hunt and his brother John start a newspaper.
Independent.
Reforming.
Anti-corruption.
And crucially, not frightened of powerful people.
Which brings us to the Prince Regent.
The future George IV.
Now, the Prince had admirers.
Or perhaps I should say flatterers.
And one newspaper had gone gloriously overboard.
The Prince Regent was, apparently, the “Glory of the People”.
The “Protector of the Arts”.
And best of all:
An “Adonis of Loveliness”.
Adonis.
The impossibly beautiful young man of Greek mythology.
Leigh Hunt looked at the Prince Regent.
A large gentleman.
Nearly fifty.
Deeply in debt.
Not universally celebrated for self-denial.
And Hunt thought:
Adonis?
Really?
So he wrote.
And out came the claws.
This supposed Adonis was, Hunt pointed out, a corpulent gentleman approaching fifty.
And then he really got going.
A violator of his word.
A libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace.
A despiser of domestic ties.
A companion of gamblers.
And a man who had reached half a century, Hunt said, without a single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.
Boom.
You can almost hear the spoon drop into the royal teacup.
And that brings us to our Word of the Day.
Libel.
We know the word.
Defamation in permanent form.
Print something damaging about somebody and you may find yourself answering for it.
But burrow into the word.
Libel comes from Latin libellus.
A little book.
A little written document.
A pamphlet.
And libellus is the diminutive of liber.
Book.
So hidden inside this fierce legal word is something rather dainty.
A little book.
Unfortunately for Leigh Hunt, his little bit of writing was about the Prince Regent.
And the Prince Regent had lawyers.
Leigh and John Hunt were prosecuted.
Found guilty.
Fined £500 each.
And sentenced to two years in prison.
Off Leigh Hunt goes to Horsemonger Lane Gaol.
South London.
And suddenly the childhood comes back.
The prison.
The locks.
The chains.
Hunt wrote about the perpetual sound of clanking chains.
It affected him badly.
He suffered nervous attacks.
But this is Leigh Hunt.
And Leigh Hunt does not do prison in the conventional manner.
He looks at his rooms and thinks:
Needs doing up.
Rose-patterned wallpaper.
Blue sky and clouds painted on the ceiling.
Bookcases.
Pictures.
A piano.
Flowers.
Outside, a little garden.
Grass.
Young trees.
An apple tree.
You walk through a grim London prison.
Stone.
Locks.
Iron.
Chains.
Then somebody opens a door.
And suddenly…
Leigh Hunt.
Roses.
Books.
Music.
Conversation.
His wife Marianne joins him.
His little boy is there.
A daughter is actually born there.
And visitors pour in.
Jeremy Bentham.
Jeremy Bentham who would have thundered, ‘Locking Leigh Hunt up, that’s nonsense on stilts.’
And the rest of the guest list.
Try Charles Lamb.
And Mary Lamb.
And Thomas Moore.
And William Hazlitt.
And Lord Byron.
Hunt has somehow turned a prison room into a literary salon.
The state says:
Shut him up.
Hunt says:
Certainly.
Do come in.
Tea?
And here’s the wonderful thing.
Somebody else is watching all this from afar.
A young man who has not yet met Leigh Hunt.
John Keats.
Keats admires him.
Admires the courage.
Admires the independence.
And when Hunt is released from prison in February 1815, Keats writes a sonnet celebrating the event.
Before they have even met.
That’s important.
Because when Keats finally does meet Leigh Hunt, he isn’t meeting just another editor.
He’s meeting one of his heroes.
Now we move to Hampstead.
Hunt is living with his family in a cottage in the Vale of Health.
The Vale of Health.
That little hollow tucked into Hampstead Heath.
And elsewhere in London there’s John Keats.
Twenty years old.
Medical training behind him.
Poetry ahead of him.
Though he doesn’t yet know how far ahead.
Keats’s friend Charles Cowden Clarke has a book he wants to show him.
George Chapman’s translation of Homer.
So one evening Keats goes to Clarke’s rooms.
Not Hampstead.
Important little correction.
Clerkenwell.
They open Chapman.
And Keats catches fire.
They read through the night.
Hour after hour.
Homer thundering through Chapman’s English.
And sometime around dawn Keats leaves.
London waking up.
First light.
Streets beginning to stir.
Homer ringing in his head.
He gets home.
And writes fourteen lines.
A sonnet.
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.
One of the great sonnets in the language.
Certainly one of the first great Keats poems.
And before the morning is properly under way, the poem is back with Cowden Clarke.
Think of the speed of that.
Read all night.
Walk home at dawn.
Sit down.
Write.
And there it is.
A masterpiece before breakfast.
Clarke takes Keats’s poems to Leigh Hunt.
Hampstead.
The Vale of Health.
Hunt reads them.
And immediately wants to meet the man who wrote them.
And so we come back to October 19th.
Hunt’s birthday.
October 19th, 1784.
And now, on October 19th, 1816, Leigh Hunt’s thirty-second birthday, John Keats comes up to Hunt’s cottage in Hampstead.
Keats knows this matters.
He later calls meeting Hunt “an Era in my existence”.
Not an evening.
Not a nice encounter.
An Era.
And Hunt sees him.
Really sees him.
The talent.
The warmth.
The extraordinary sensitivity.
He doesn’t pat him on the head and send him away.
He publishes him.
He encourages him.
He introduces him.
He brings him into the room.
And what a little world gathered around that Hampstead cottage.
Keats was there.
Shelley was there.
Keats actually met Shelley there.
Hazlitt came.
The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon came.
Charles Lamb was part of Hunt’s circle.
Books.
Pictures.
Arguments.
Poetry.
Politics.
Young men talking much too late into the night.
Possibility everywhere.
And one of the things I love about this story is that we know what happens next.
They don’t.
Keats is going to die at twenty-five.
Shelley at twenty-nine.
Byron at thirty-six.
But not yet.
Not in that Hampstead room.
At that moment everything is ahead of them.
And Hunt is at the centre of it.
Not necessarily the greatest genius in the room.
But perhaps the man most likely to say:
Come in.
Sit down.
Read me what you’ve written.
In December 1816 Hunt publishes his essay “Young Poets”.
He introduces his readers to Shelley.
John Hamilton Reynolds.
And the youngest of them all.
John Keats.
He’s putting Keats’s name into circulation.
He’s saying to London:
Watch this young man.
And Hunt’s friendship wasn’t merely literary networking.
Years later, when Keats was desperately ill with tuberculosis, Hunt cared for him in his own home.
Shelley too.
After the suicide of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, Hunt spent the day with him.
Shelley called him “a most friendly, and excellent man”.
That, I think, is the real Leigh Hunt.
Friends mattered.
People mattered.
And then comes Italy.
Byron and Shelley are there.
There’s a scheme for a new journal.
Hunt hauls his family across Europe.
Wife.
Six children.
Not exactly travelling light.
They reach Pisa.
Shelley is ecstatic to see them.
Absolutely delighted.
And one week later Shelley is dead.
Drowned.
One week.
Hunt had crossed Europe to begin something new with his friend.
And suddenly the friend is gone.
He would never really stop mourning him.
Back in England, Hunt’s life becomes what it always seems to become.
Writing.
Editing.
Publishing.
New journals.
Collapsed journals.
Books.
Debts.
Friends.
Illness.
Money.
Always money.
He lives in Chelsea.
Upper Cheyne Row.
And nearby is Thomas Carlyle.
Now putting Leigh Hunt and Thomas Carlyle beside one another is one of history’s better jokes.
Hunt.
Buoyant.
Social.
Optimistic.
Books everywhere.
Children everywhere.
Visitors everywhere.
Money nowhere.
Carlyle.
Granite.
Thunder.
Prophecy.
Doom.
And yet they became friends.
Carlyle could be appalled by the disorder of the Hunt household.
He once called in on the Hunts, took it all in, went home and told his wife Jane Carlyle, “the Hunts are living in studied squalor.”
But for all, Carlyle loved Hunt.
And Hunt, even when everything around him was going wrong, somehow kept producing this belief that humanity might yet come right.
Then Dickens.
Dickens knew Hunt well.
Respected him.
Wanted his opinion.
And then did him a very mixed favour.
Bleak House.
Harold Skimpole.
Charming.
Cultivated.
Childlike.
Hopeless with money.
Entirely dependent on other people.
People who knew Hunt recognised him immediately.
And Dickens later admitted that the portrait had been extremely close to a real man.
Hunt was hurt.
Understandably.
Because Dickens had taken Hunt’s weaknesses and sharpened them.
Made them colder.
More selfish.
More parasitic.
And that wasn’t the whole man.
Not remotely.
Yes, Hunt was hopeless with money.
But he was also generous.
Kind.
Brave.
Loyal.
A man who had gone to prison rather than stop saying what he believed.
A man who opened doors for Keats.
A man who comforted Shelley.
A man who kept writing.
Kept publishing.
Kept believing.
And money dogged him right to the end.
Friends tried to help.
There were grants.
A pension.
Dickens and other actors staged benefit performances for him.
And when Leigh Hunt finally died in 1859, his estate was valued at under £200.
Under £200.
Not £200 in our money, of course.
It was a substantial sum compared with today’s £200.
But here’s the telling comparison.
For the last years of his life, Hunt’s government pension alone had been £200 a year.
He died worth less than one year’s pension.
That seems somehow very Leigh Hunt.
Money came.
Money went.
Books remained.
Friends remained.
Words remained.
He died in Putney on August 28th, 1859.
Seventy-four years old.
He’d gone there for a change of air.
And of course he took his work with him.
His books.
His papers.
Still working.
Almost to the end.
His son said the cause was simply exhaustion.
He broke off his work.
Lay down.
His only uneasiness, he said, was failing breath.
And then, ten years later, on October 19th…
There’s that date again.
October 19th.
His birthday.
A monument to Leigh Hunt was unveiled.
And on it they put a line from one of his own poems.
Abou Ben Adhem.
And I don’t think anybody could have found a better epitaph.
“Write me as one who loves his fellow-men.”
That’s Leigh Hunt.
Not the greatest poet of his generation.
He knew greater poets.
Helped greater poets.
Loved greater poets.
And when a young John Keats came up to his cottage in Hampstead with poems in his pocket, Leigh Hunt did one of the most important things anybody can do for a young talent.
He opened the door.
October 19th.
One October 19th Leigh Hunt is born.
Thirty-two years later, on another October 19th, John Keats comes into his world.
One date.
Two beginnings.
And perhaps one perfect epitaph.
“Write me as one who loves his fellow-men.”
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
See you tomorrow.