Search Results

“... deny that Harold Skimpole, the parasitical aesthete of Bleak House, had been based on his friend Leigh Hunt; but later he confessed, not a little proudly, that the character was ‘the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words . . . it is an absolute reproduction of a real man.’ Skimpole is a corrosive presence in the novel, a serene-faced ...”

“... important job, and Jeffrey Cox’s study is a good example of what can be done, for he avoids the hunt-the-slipper determination which has caused some zealous critics to see a covert political message lurking in every heartfelt Romantic line. There is no likelihood at all that Wordsworth was actually thinking of the revolutionary Tree of Liberty when the ...”

“... Leigh Hunt was a poet, playwright (tragic and comic), masque composer, translator (from Latin, French and Italian), satirist, anthologist, biographer and autobiographer, magazine editor, political journalist, theatre and literary critic, occasional essayist, philosopher of religion. He was also a jailbird and redcoat volunteer, flautist and War Office clerk, dandy (blue frock-coat and orange gloves) and sloven among slovens, chronic debtor and philanthropist, vagrant and on-the-spot accoucheur, free love enthusiast and original of Dickens’s Harold Skimpole ...”

“... the beginning of 1814, kind-hearted Charles Lamb was out in all weathers, visiting the imprisoned Leigh Hunt who had been put away for two years for ridiculing the Prince Regent. Hyde Park was then littered with dirty people and provisions (not that much has changed in the interval), Mary Lamb had toothache very badly and was about to go mad ...”

“... and improvements in the early cantos, in copying them himself.) With Mary Shelley was staying Leigh Hunt, obsequious, resentful of Byron’s patronage, and, Skimpole-like, borrowing and squandering his money. Hunt was a terrible legacy from Shelley. His nagging wife hated Byron, would not speak Italian, and their ...”

“... world where high thinking went with ramshackle living. Haydon’s friends, Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and the young Keats were all, like him, mostly self-educated and chronically short of money. Haydon had also come to know Wordsworth, who was in London in December 1817. On the 28th Haydon invited him to dinner to meet Keats. Charles Lamb ...”

“... a gift for describing nature, and the temptation to over-use it must have been considerable. Like Leigh Hunt, with whom he identified even more than with Clare, Blunden certainly did write too much, although in both cases there was more financial need in this than temptation. Poetry produced every day could hardly give Housman’s shiver. Blunden’s ...”

“... her small son Percy’s self-willed behaviour. She was pleased enough to report the compliment to Leigh and Marianne Hunt in a letter; and if she seems a little arch in liking compliments, she strikes the reader too as deserving them. This is the letter of an unusually intrepid and well-educated woman: it mixes affectionate ...”

“... corner.’ Lady Geraldine’s courtship had been drowned out by talk about Elizabeth’s. Aurora Leigh wasn’t faring any better. The first edition had sold out in a fortnight in 1856 and more than twenty reprints had come out by 1902, but after that there wasn’t another edition until 1978. ‘I don’t want any more of Aurora ...”

“... the grain of his natural genius. He did not want to write the sort of ‘unmisgiving’ poetry (Leigh Hunt’s remarkable adjective) which came, with help from Shakespeare, like the leaves to the tree. If Keats had possessed the native cynicism of Leigh Hunt himself, or – a rather different kind – of Robert ...”

“... essentially human feelings. Carlyle happened to be in the library in 1875 when Bryan Courthope Hunt – the child of a famously irregular marriage – chose to commit suicide there. Hunt had asked at the issue desk for the second volume of George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind but discovered that it was ...”

“... atheist with Shelley as his idol. Lewes actually wrote a biography of Shelley, encouraged by Leigh Hunt, though not by Mary Shelley. It was never published, he himself soon deciding it was a poor piece of work, and it disappeared. I have always regretted this lost book, but Professor Ashton convinces us that Lewes’s low opinion of it was the right ...”

“... health’, and she pleaded with Shelley to abandon his plans to sail to Livorno to meet Byron and Leigh Hunt, where they intended to discuss their new magazine, the Liberal. ‘I could not endure that he should go,’ Mary wrote. He went all the same, with Edward Williams, Daniel Roberts (the naval captain who had overseen the building of the boat) and ...”

“... four sons. Then Agnes bore a fifth son whose father was Lewes’s friend and colleague Thornton Leigh Hunt. Unwilling to stigmatise the child, Lewes forgave the offence and allowed the boy to be registered as Edmund Lewes – perhaps with a wry glance at the bastard in King Lear. But the offence was repeated; and before Agnes bore the second of her ...”

“... and as a stern moralist as well. He had been wondering whether or not to obtain a copy of Leigh Hunt’s Comic Dramatists of the Restoration – ‘the question being whether the mental pollution arising from Messrs Congreve, Wycherley and Co would be compensated for by the picture of the manners and customs of those days to be gathered from ...”