Filling out the pages of journals like The Examiner, The Indicator and The Liberal (history's first recorded use, Holden tells us, of the term as a noun) was the work of the second-generation Romantics: Keats, Shelley and Byron, all of them Hunt's comrades in the effort to 'give the world another heart,' as Keats wrote in an early sonnet. Although Coleridge worried that the youth would be 'ruined' by 'the fashion of getting up prodigies,' Hunt's output remained steady and his style matured as he went on to help found and edit more than a half dozen journals in the coming decades, for which he provided poetry, essays and editorials.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb had graduated in classes ahead of him.īy age 12, Hunt had decided to become a poet, and at 16 he'd composed enough verse to fill a book, 'Juvenilia,' that went through four editions in as many years, making the 'young Roscius' the toast of London salon society. The following year, Hunt won a spot at London's famous charity school, Christ's Hospital, a training ground since Shakespeare's day for literary men of little means. Books of amusement I read at my leisure,' the boy wrote to an aunt. But Leigh was soon let loose in his father's library, where by age 6 he had learned to 'perfectly repeat 2,063 words' in Latin. Hunt was born in 1784, and his first memory was of a prison cell: his impecunious father, a lawyer-turned-preacher from Barbados whose 'dash of 'creole' blood' may have been the source of Leigh's tawny good looks, had landed with his family in debtor's jail. Albans), Holden seems well suited to recount this rare story of a writer's life that's more dramatic than anything contrived by the writer's own imagination. It's little wonder that Anthony Holden - prolific journalist, biographer and translator - was drawn to the life of Leigh Hunt, a writer whose 'overproductivity' in virtually every literary genre left him open to charges that he possessed, as the painter Benjamin Haydon put it, 'a smattering of everything and mastery of nothing.' The author of biographies of Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky, Olivier, Prince Charles and the serial killer Graham Young ('the teacup poisoner' of St. The Remarkable Life of Leigh Hunt - Poet, Revolutionary, and the Last of the Romantics.

Olivier by Anthony Holden