Leigh Hunt, 1999

WORKS: COLLECTED, SELECTED, SINGLE , TRANSLATED

Gates, Eleanor, ed.  Leigh Hunt: A Life in Letters.  Essex, CT: Falls River Publications, 1998.

A rather idiosyncratic selection of some 442 letters from Hunt's voluminous correspondence, covering dates ranging from 1802 to 1859.  Many of the Hunt letters have not previously been published.  Gates also includes 14 Hazlitt letters. 

BOOKS AND ARTICLES RELATING TO HUNT

Cox, Jeffrey N. "Leigh Hunt's Cockney School: The Lakers' 'Other'." RoN 14 (May 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/huntlakers.html>.

Cox identifies a number of parallels between the critical treatment of the "Lakers" and the critical treatment of the Cockney School; as a consequence of the comparative analysis, Cox finds that the latter school—though frequently ideologically derided—offers a useful cultural model: "The real Cockney School, the circle gathered around Hunt, offered itself through its collective, collaborative work as a kind of prefigurative community; they sought an image in their circle of the reformed world they imagined. Against the violence of a society long devoted to war and the cultural despondency they saw embodied in the Lakers, the Cockneys pitted sociability: the bonds between them offered the hope for a society unbound."

Cox, Jeffrey.  Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 

"Jeffrey N. Cox refines our conception of 'second-generation' Romanticism by placing it within the circle of writers around Leigh Hunt that came to be known as the Cockney School. Offering a theory of the group as a key site for cultural production, Cox challenges the traditional image of the Romantic poet as an isolated figure by recreating the social nature of the work of Shelley, Keats, Hunt, Hazlitt, Byron, and others as they engaged in literary contests, wrote poems celebrating one another, and worked collaboratively on journals and other projects.  Cox also recovers the work of neglected writers such as John Hamilton Reynolds, Horace Smith, and Cornelius Webb as part of the rich social and cultural context of Hunt's circle.  This book not only demonstrates convincingly that a Cockney School existed, but shows that it was committed to putting literature in the service of social, cultural, and political reform."  And one might add to this reasonably accurate and comprehensive dustjacket description that Cox implicity reorganizes the now conventional way of arranging the later Romantic writers into various author-centered "circles"—e.g. "The Shelley Circle"—arguing instead for the designation of a distinct, unified, and prolific literary-cultural "School."

Kucich, Greg.  “’The Wit in the Dungeon’: Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries.”  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 242-53.

Kucich suggests that Leigh Hunt's prison cell—occupied for two years after Hunt was found guilty of libel in 1813—formed the initial site wherein the Cockney School was formed.  This School (increasingly viewed as cultural counter to the Lake Poets) and the activities in Hunt's prison cell "helped foster a group identity and a cultural project that strongly affected the course of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century while establishing an important model of progressive gender relations among the period's second generation of writers."  Appears also in RoN, see below.

Kucich, Greg. "'The Wit in the Dungeon': Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries." RoN 14 (May 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/cockneycoteries.html>.

Appears also in ERR, see above.

Mizukoshi, Ayumi. "The Cockney Politics of Gender — the Cases of Hunt and Keats." RoN 14 (May 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/cockneygender.html>.

Situating the Cockney School writers—especially Hunt and Keats—within an emergent middle-class ideology (with all its gendered assumptions), Mizukoshi illustrates how the Cockneys "adopted and appropriated ubiquitous gendered language in order to legitimise their bourgeois poetics and politics."  One particularly cogent observation demonstrates that Keats's reputation as a "strong" poet with distinctly masculine aspirations—in contrast to the effeminate Hunt—is a twentieth-century critical redaction of the emergent gendered politics of the early nineteenth-century.

Sharp, Ronald A.  "Keats and Friendship."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 66-81.

Sharp discusses the importance of—and Keats's dedication to—a close circle of friends including Cowden Clarke, Joseph Severn, Benjamin Bailey, John Hamilton Reynolds, Charles Brown, Leigh Hunt, and others: "from beginning to end, Keats's was a life densely crowded and textured with friendships and resonant with friends' voices.  He was aware of the importance of friendship and profoundly reflective about its nature" (66).  In Sharp's view, Keats's poems are thus imbued with a kind of open-hearted friendliness that could acknowledge both the joys and the sorrows of personal relationships: "What I want to emphasize here is that Keats's ability to accept the sorrow inherent in friendship without reducing friendship to therapy accounts in large measure for the authenticity—the lack of meretriciousness—of both his empathy and his delight" (80).  The essay also appears in the Kenyon Review, 21.1 (1999): 124-37.

Sharp, Ronald A.  "Keats and Friendship."  Kenyon Review 21.1 (1999): 124-37.

See above.

Stam, David H.  "'A Glutton for Books': Leigh Hunt and the London Library, 1844-46."  Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 6.2 (Spring 1998): 149-89.