Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (51 page)

In the spring of 1825, however, John Hunt did a remarkably selfless thing, when, in spite of the ongoing dispute, he persuaded Henry Colburn, a sympathetic fellow publisher and periodical proprietor, to print articles by Leigh in the
New Monthly Magazine
. As a result of these articles, Colburn, who had watched with interest as the reading public devoured rapidly produced memoirs of Byron, wrote to Hunt offering him an advance of £200 for his account of the poet. Even as the quarrel about
The Examiner
descended into open rancour, John’s instinctive kindness and his sense of familial responsibility would not permit him to abandon the careless, talented younger brother whose career he had nurtured and whose character he had tried to reform. Leigh was ecstatic at the thought of an advance that would allow him to end his Italian exile.
‘This is excellent!’ he told Novello joyfully. ‘I shall, then, see you all shortly! I shall drink tea in the garden! . . . I shall have dear Wilful
*
shaking her head, but not her heart at me, and giving infinite little laughs!’ Colburn, he concluded, was ‘the most
engaging
of publishers.’
³²
He never made the connection between Colburn’s offer and his brother’s influence.

The Hunts left Italy in September, and travelled back overland across Europe.  They were sorry to leave Charles Brown, who organised the packing up and sending on of the many objects they left behind, but they had few other causes for regret. Although the journey was difficult, and the children became tetchy and cross after long hours cooped up in a carriage, Hunt wrote a series of happy letters to Bess charting their passage across Italy, Switzerland and France.  Bess’s brother Tom Kent had sent Hunt a pair of spectacles, causing him to ‘profanely bless the Author of my eyesight’. ‘Through his means’, he told Bess, ‘I had the pleasure of discerning the remotest beauties of the Alps, and of being frightened with the divers beautiful precipices in Savoy.’
³³
Even being jolted along bad French roads and the fact that they had no home to go to in England could not diminish Hunt’s delight.

They finally arrived back in London a month after their departure from Florence, and had a series of ecstatic reunions with Bess, the Novellos, Mary and the Lambs. Despite the disasters that had befallen him, Hunt still retained his belief in the essential power of friendship. Finding himself among his friends once more only served to confirm that sociability was not merely an intellectual conceit, but an article of faith.

But while Hunt’s faith had not faltered during the years of his Italian exile, the same was not true for his friends. He arrived home expecting to find his network unaltered, and its members ready to resume their positions as satellites circling his sun. Instead he found them scattered and too busy with their own lives to do much more than welcome him home. Charles and Mary Lamb were preoccupied with worries about Mary’s health, which was disrupted by severe periods of insanity throughout the 1820s. Hazlitt, who had recently remarried, was travelling abroad with his new wife for much of 1825, and Hogg was in Italy, indulging in reminiscences of Shelley with Mrs Mason and Teresa Guiccioli. Haydon had long since ceased to consider Hunt his friend and Charles Brown, Horace Smith and Joseph Severn remained dispersed throughout Europe. Bess was busy with her own work and with her correspondence with John Clare, and Mary, like the Novellos, had moved out of London and was living in Kentish Town near Jane Williams.
³⁴
She was too poor to travel into town for frequent social calls and there was in any case a renewed
froideur
between her and Hunt, which stemmed from a dispute about a profile of Shelley Hunt planned to publish in the
Westminster Review
. Mary and Peacock acted in concert to prevent the profile from appearing, largely because it was inaccurate about Harriet and indiscreet about Claire. Hunt, however, was convinced that they had interfered in order to keep Shelley for themselves, and to prevent him from telling the world of the crucial role he had played in Shelley’s life.

Hunt’s homecoming was thus, in many ways, disappointing. The network which sustained his imagination during his absence turned out now to be a chimera.  As far as Hunt’s friends were concerned this was a natural progression, in which the demands of work and family took precedence over youthful ideals of communal living. They recognised that their intense, claustrophobic, clubbable circle of the 1810s belonged to a different era. Its public and private significance had faded as British politics entered the calmer waters of the 1820s and their individual responsibilities towards parents, husbands, wives and children increased. Hunt, in contrast, would cling to an ideal of sociability even when it no longer bore any resemblance to the reality of his life. Indeed, his vision of a community of gregarious spirits marching together against oppression and corruption had, if anything, become more strident in the decade since he had gone to prison a martyr for the causes of free speech and reform. This much was evident from a letter written in March 1825, when his Italian exile seemed never-ending.  The letter’s recipient was a young Shelley devotee called John Claris:

What is wanted, to secure victory, is a regular supply of unchanging and strait-forward spirits, inflexible alike either to misfortune or worldly interest; and as long as the life in me will hold me up, I, for my part, am determined to be one.  We ought to look upon ourselves as soldiers, and make it a point of honour to do for the greatest of all causes what any decent gentleman can do for the honour of his regiment.  We will love deeply; we will not refuse any lighter solace of sociality, that comes; we will have our sprightly songs, as well as our war-songs & our marches; but for the honour of our
profession
, – of our intellectual and moral soldiership, – & above all, for the good of the world, & the deliverances we are to effect for it, let us never give in.
³⁵

The imagery of this letter suggested that the reverses suffered by Hunt’s company of campaigners – the deaths of Keats and Shelley, betrayal by Byron and Haydon, the skirmishes with
Blackwood’s
– could not dim their determination to unite in friendship to reform the world.  What Hunt did not know when he wrote this letter was that his company had disbanded in his absence. The battles over sociability that would take place after 1825 would not be fought between Hunt’s circle and the rest of the world, but between the members of that circle. At stake were competing visions of a shared past.

11

The Past

In 1836, eleven years after the Hunts returned to England, Charles Brown gave a lecture at the Plymouth Literary Institution. His subject was the ‘Life of Keats’, and he approached the evening with a certain amount of trepidation. ‘Many a resolution and many an attempt have I made to write a life of our Keats, but the pain as often made me defer it’, he told Hunt, a week before the lecture. ‘Still’, he continued, ‘I felt it a duty . . . so, to-morrow week, in the evening, from seven to ten o’Clock, you may imagine me reading my paper to about a hundred gentlemen, explaining any question I may be asked, or discussing his merits as a poet, or reading his posthumous poems.’
¹

Brown made several attempts to write about Keats in the years following the poet’s death. Indeed his 1836 lecture stemmed from a memoir begun in 1830, which he worked and reworked in the intervening years. Although he never managed to produce a full-scale biography of his friend, he did make repeated efforts to have his lecture published, in the hope that it would stand as a permanent record of the Keats he had known. But he met with little success, and in 1841 he emigrated to New Zealand with his son Carlino, leaving the unpublished manuscript of the lecture behind. He died a year later, and was buried in the settlement of New Plymouth, on New Zealand’s North Island. In 1921, his descendants organised a headstone for his grave. The inscription they chose was one of which Brown would have approved. It read as follows: ‘Charles Armitage Brown. The Friend of Keats.’ Brown knew that posterity would view his relationship with Keats as his greatest achievement, and he understood that his own history had been shaped by his friendships with famous men.  On 27 December 1836, in the dimly lit rooms of the Plymouth Institution, he acknowledged that he would always stand in Keats’s shadow. ‘His fame’, he told his audience, ‘is part of my life.’
²

In the years following the deaths of Keats, Shelley and Byron, their old circle discovered the accuracy of this statement, as individual lives were shaped by other people’s fame. Some, such as Haydon and Hogg, found this difficult, while others – chiefly Mary and Hunt – came to realise that the stature of their friends offered them the chance to reshape their own lives according to a particular set of ideals, and that they could use the past to reinvent themselves. What they failed to realise was that, in the process, the memories of friends would be transformed from sources of consolation into sources of conflict, and that separate versions of a shared history would test the allegiances of the remaining members of Keats’s ‘web . . . of mingled yarn’ to the limit.

Hunt fired the opening salvo in the battle for ownership of the past in 1828 when he published the memoir of Byron commissioned by Colburn in 1825.
Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries
was Hunt’s first serious attempt at autobiography, and in it he placed himself at the centre of a vividly realised intellectual world. Its cast of characters were united by their friendship with him, and he presented himself as the axis around which the great figures of the Romantic era revolved. It contained a detailed narrative of the Surrey Gaol years and the journey to Italy, as well as pen-portraits of individual members of his circle: Horace Smith, Charles Lamb, Keats and Shelley. In these pen-portraits the group was recreated in print once more, just as it had been over the years in
The Examiner
,
Foliage
and
The Liberal
.

Hunt was full of praise for his friends, highlighting Shelley’s strong sense of natural justice and Keats’s prodigious talent. Nevertheless, his appropriation of the legacies of the dead in support of his version of the past was not well received by his contemporaries. Keats’s supporters were enraged that
their
poet was once again being tainted by association with Leigh Hunt. ‘I should be extremely sorry’, wrote Keats’s brother George, ‘that poor John’s name should go down to posterity associated with the littleness of L. H., an association of which he was so impatient in his Lifetime.’
³
Byron’s friends were equally horrified by Hunt’s portrait of their poet, and they had good reason to feel affronted, since Hunt presented Byron as the villain of
Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries
, accusing him of miserliness, gluttony, indolence and capriciousness. He criticised Byron’s treatment of those in need (‘the first time Lord Byron discovered I was in want, was the first time he treated me with disrespect’),
⁴
his relationship with Teresa Guiccioli (‘there was no real love on either side’),
⁵
and his disloyalty: ‘he would do the most humiliating things, insinuate the bitterest, both of me and my friends, and then affect to do all away with a soft word, protesting that nothing he ever said was meant to apply to myself.’
⁶
All this made Byron’s friends justifiably angry, and even the more temperate literary reviewers felt that Hunt’s character assassination of a dead man was distasteful. For those who disliked Hunt and admired Byron his book was the quintessence of Cockney vulgarity. John Gibson Lockhart summarised many of the reviews when he condemned
Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries
as ‘the miserable book of a miserable man’.
⁷
 

Hunt was appalled by the reaction to his book and he attempted to make amends to Byron when he came to publish his
Autobiography
almost a quarter of a century later. There he sought to excuse the uncharacteristic vitriol of his earlier work by describing the unhappy circumstances of its composition. It had been written, after all, when he was at his lowest ebb, destroyed by Shelley’s unexpected demise and by Byron’s unaccountable unfriendliness. ‘I can say . . . that I was then a young man, and that I am now advanced in years. I can say, that I was agitated by grief and anger, and that I am now free from anger. I can say, that I was far more alive to other people’s defects than to my own, and that I am now sufficiently sensible of my own to show to others the charity which I need myself.’
⁸
But these admissions came too late, and Hunt’s reputation never recovered from the critical onslaught that followed the publication of
Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries
. The book destroyed Hunt’s credibility, and undermined his claim to be the chief custodian of his friends’ posthumous reputations. With its publication Hunt, once the figure around whom others revolved, who had done so much to foster friendships and to celebrate the work of his friends, was categorised as a literary parasite. Journals that once bemoaned his influence on Shelley, Keats and Byron were able to position him as an isolated figure of fun, who inspired disdain rather than respect.
*
As a result, a work designed to celebrate the idea of the group actually hastened its ideological disintegration.