28/08/2026
On this day, 28 August, in 1859, died James Henry Leigh Hunt - poet, journalist, critic, radical, and one of the most colourful characters of the Romantic literary world.
He was born in 1784 in Southgate, London, where his parents had settled after leaving the USA. His father, a Philadelphia lawyer, and his mother, a merchant's daughter and a devout Quaker, had been forced to come to Britain because of their loyalist sympathies during the American War of Independence.
Hunt’s first book of poetry, Juvenilia (1801), put him firmly on the literary scene at 17. Through his lifetime, he published more than 50 volumes of prose, poetry, and drama, as well as a huge number of influential reviews, articles, and miscellaneous essays for newspapers and magazines, usually of a critical nature.
As an editor of the radical newspaper The Examiner, he was clearly expressing his opinion on political subjects, fearlessly attacking the government and upsetting the authorities by pointing out on every issue's front page that half the cost of its price was the result of the government’s “tax on knowledge”. The journal gave support to radicals such as Henry Brougham and Sir Francis Burdett and the ideas of people like Robert Owen and Jeremy Bentham.
In 1812, Leigh and his brother John were found guilty of libel after The Examiner described the Prince Regent (the future George IV) as a “fat Adonis”. Hunt was sentenced to two years in prison.
He was allowed to decorate his room, bring in furniture… and have his family stay with him. His prison quarters became a meeting place for some of the leading literary and political figures of the day, including Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Lamb and Lord Brougham.
Hunt maintained close friendships with both Keats and Shelley. They visited frequently, wrote poetry together and encouraged one another. On Shelley’s wedding night Hunt and Keats sat at a fireside in the Vale of Health, Hampstead, penning sonnets for a competition.
In 1817 Hunt and his entire family stayed in Marlowe with Shelley for several months, and in 1820 Keats, mortally ill with tuberculosis, stayed with Hunt for several months in his cottage at Hampstead Heath.
In 1821, Shelley invited Hunt and his family to join him and Lord Byron in Italy, where they planned to launch a new literary magazine, The Liberal. Hunt, his wife Marianne, their children (including son named Percy Bysshe Shelley Hunt) and a pet goat squeezed aboard a small ship bound for Italy. When they finally reached Leghorn after months of delay, Shelley hurried to meet them. Only a week later, however, he drowned.
Hunt attended Shelley's famous cremation on the beach at Viareggio in 1822. He took a piece of a friend's jawbone, and kept it on his desk as a morbid keepsake for the rest of his life.
Hunt's life was marked by financial difficulties. He was often indebted to his kind friends, mostly Shelley, to keep his large family afloat.
He died suddenly on 28 August 1859, while visiting a friend Charles Reynell in Putney.
His Grade II listed monument in Kensal Green Cemetery, paid for by public subscriptions, originally included a portrait bust by sculptor Joseph Durham (also buried in Kensal Green Cemetery), but it was stolen years ago. The inscription reminds us that he was "one that loved his fellow-men" - and by all the help that was given to him throughout his life, you can tell that they loved him too.
He outlived many of his contemporaries and bridged the gap between the Romantic poets and Victorian authors, and the eras of the French Revolution and nineteenth-century imperial Britain. His son, Thornton Leigh Hunt (1810-1873), also became a successful journalist.
Charles Dickens based the sponging, irresponsible character Harold Skimpole in Bleak House heavily on Hunt's personality.
In September 1966, Christ's Hospital named one of its houses in the memory of Hunt. Today, a residential street in his birthplace of Southgate is named Leigh Hunt Drive in his honour. There are six Blue Plaques in London dedicated to him.
