"The pale magician of the bow" : Leigh Hunt's "Paganini"

Abstract

Although a fine poet in his own right, Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) is mainly remembered for publishing poetry by Keats, Byron and Shelley. Educated at Christ's Hospital in London, he was prevented from attending university because of a speech impediment, and spent most of his teenage years writing poetry in the style of Thomas Gray and William Collins. His early poems, published in 1801 under the title Juvenilia, launched him into literary society. In 1808 he left the War Office where he had been working as a clerk, and became editor of the Examiner, a newspaper founded by his brother, John, which was mainly concerned with the discussion of politics, but which also contained criticism of the theatre, literature and the fine arts. Keats, who formed part of the literary circle which had gathered around Hunt at his home in Hampstead, approved of the newspaper's unusual political independence, but the boldness with which Hunt expressed his radical political views on, for example, household suffrage, abolition, Catholic Emancipation and the Sovereign, often resulted in libel: in 1812 Hunt suffered a two-year prison sentence and a fine of £1,000 for an attack on the Prince Regent, pronounced, among other things, as a "libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace". From prison he continued to edit his libellous newspaper. Hunt went on to have a sixty-year publishing career not only as a prolific journalist and editor, but also as an essayist, translator, play-wright, novelist, and above all, poet.