Byron, Hunt, and the Politics of Literary Engagement

Michael Steier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000084795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the British press began a campaign of critical abuse against Leigh Hunt, caricaturing the radical journalist as an upstart "Cockney" author whose literary talents were as disreputable as his politics. Lord Byron, on the other hand, was revered as a peer and a poetical genius who, the conservative press argued, would never befriend and collaborate with a writer like Hunt. Yet Byron did just that.

Byron, Hunt, and the Politics of Literary Engagement is the first full-length study of the friendship and literary relationship of two of the most important second-generation Romantic authors. Challenging long-held critical attitudes, this study shows that Byron and Hunt engaged in a creative and meaningful dialogue at each major stage in their careers, from their earliest published volumes of juvenile poetry and verse satire to their most celebrated contributions to Romantic literature: The Story of Rimini and Don Juan. Drawing upon newly recovered letters and unpublished manuscript material, this book illuminates the surprisingly durable and artistically significant friendship of Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt.

1 Byron, Hunt, and the Juvenile Tradition

When Byron met Hunt at Horsemonger Lane Gaol in May of 1813, the poet called attention to the imprisoned editor’s Juvenilia, a collection of adolescent verses Hunt had published at age seventeen. Hunt recalled Byron saying “that the sight of my volume at Harrow had been one of his incentives to write verses, and that he had had the same passion for friendship that I had displayed in it.” The editor added, “To my astonishment, he quoted some of the lines, and would not hear me speak ill of them” (LBSC 2). Hunt published this anecdote at least four times in his life: first, in a poem of farewell “To the Right Honourable Lord Byron, on his Departure for Italy and Greece,” which was printed in The Examiner on 28 April 1816 and reprinted in Foliage in 1818; Hunt later mentioned the anecdote in a sketch of Byron’s character printed in The Examiner on 29 July 1821 and again in Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries in 1828. Clearly, Byron’s interest in Juvenilia had served an important need for the beleaguered editor: the famous creator of Childe Harold had acknowledged Hunt as an author of no ordinary ability—a juvenile author—during a period when Hunt’s political imprisonment for libelling the Prince Regent had overshadowed his past artistic achievements. Yet Juvenilia, as Hunt revealingly shows, had also satisfied an important, early artistic need for Byron, having provided the young aristocrat with “incentive” to begin writing verses during his teenage years. This is not surprising, for Hunt’s Juvenilia, as Laurie Langbauer has shown, was one of the most popular adolescent volumes published in the first decade of the nineteenth century, moving quickly through four editions and helping to shape an emerging juvenile tradition of literature in Britain.¹

Critics have generally ignored the juvenile poetry produced by Byron and Hunt, but there has been some recent interest in Hunt’s Juvenilia, and Jerome McGann’s assessment of Byron’s juvenile volumes is still incisive.² McGann observes that Hours of Idleness, in particular, contains many examples of the authorial self-fashioning that would be used to great advantage in Childe Harold, a palimpsest of fictionalized biography, which Byron liked to believe had transformed him overnight into a literary celebrity.³ More specifically, McGann argues that “both the Preface and a majority of the notes scattered throughout [Hours of Idleness] are as self-conscious as the verse itself.”⁴ As Langbauer shows, the juvenile tradition through which Byron and Hunt emerged as authors was itself a highly self-conscious tradition.⁵ For Byron, however, the line between self-consciousness and egotism blurred in ways that make Hours of Idleness a “naively self-absorbed book,” according to McGann.⁶ Caroline Franklin sees Byron’s “touchy insistence on rank” as a strong mark of this naive self-absorption. Allusions to Byron’s “heritage of nobility,” Franklin points out, appear throughout Hours of Idleness, most obviously in poems such as “On Leaving Newstead Abbey” and “Elegy on Newstead Abbey” but also in poems such as “Stanzas” (“I would I were a careless child”).⁷ Byron’s class posturing famously roused the critical ire of Henry Brougham, who attacked both the poetry and the poet in a review of Hours of Idleness for the Edinburgh Review. Hunt’s Juvenilia, on the other hand, was successful, in part, because of the self-conscious but deferential attitude he presented therein. As Hunt later remarked, for a juvenile poet to begin from a place of rank and privilege was unusual, and Byron’s public acknowledgment of this privilege is what sets his juvenilia apart from the volumes produced by other adolescent authors in the first decade of the nineteenth century.⁸

When Hunt and Byron published their juvenile volumes, the concept of adolescent genius had not yet gained full critical acceptance: young artists were often just as likely to be criticized as celebrated, thereby making adolescent authorship an unstable venture for those willing to pursue it. As such, the early volumes produced by Byron and Hunt not only reveal significant details about their development as young authors working within a shared tradition, but also about the conditions of Romantic authorship at a transitional moment when the major Romantic reviews (the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review) were just coming into existence. The literary engagements between young authors and their reviewers, therefore, provide a relevant point of entry for locating the origins of the print politics that would so decisively come to shape the Byron-Hunt literary relationship in the public spaces of Romantic literary culture.

The Cult of Juvenilia

Adolescent genius made a controversial entrance into nineteenth-century British literary culture on the legacy of Thomas Chatterton, the ill-fated boy poet from Bristol.⁹ As Daniel Cook has shown, there were complexities that came with juvenile authorship that can be traced to the critical reception of Chatterton’s life and works. An article in the Monthly Mirror for July 1799 by Robert Fellowes, Curate of Harbury, illustrates the many facets of Chatterton’s character under discussion two years before Hunt’s Juvenilia made its public appearance. Fellowes stated in no uncertain terms that Chatterton was one of the “most extraordinary personages that has appeared in the present century,” adding that the young poet had “imbibed a passion for fame, and a thirst for distinction.” The curate further observed that in “young Chatterton, the love of pre-eminence was an impetuous and ruling passion,” a passion that some, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, saw as a dangerous moral failing and a factor that may have contributed to Chatterton’s suicide at the age of seventeen.¹⁰ Fellowes, however, argued that Chatterton had successfully channeled that “passion” into accomplished poetry, including the infamous collection of Poems, Supposed to have been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century. For many commentators, the Rowley poems, which generated a lengthy public controversy over their authenticity, exposed Chatterton as a literary fraud. Yet for supporters like Fellowes, the ruse was itself an act of original genius, a “wonderful forgery” that revealed Chatterton’s ability to transform himself successfully into a marketable author. Fellowes is astute on this point, suggesting that if Chatterton had published his Rowley poems under his own name, he would have been ignored outside of Bristol. Instead, by creating a complex authorial persona that played upon the period’s antiquarian interests, Chatterton had responded ingeniously to the material conditions of the literary marketplace. Of course, Fellowes, like many who had written upon Chatterton in the last decades of the eighteenth century, had also taken Chatterton’s age into account in his assessment of the poet’s life and art. Indeed, readers were reminded that Chatterton at the “age of sixteen” produced the “tragedy of Ella” (Ælla: A Tragycal Enterlude) and that in the “exuberance of [his] juvenile imagination, there are examples of the true sublime.”

For Byron and Hunt, Chatterton’s “juvenile imagination” was matched, if not surpassed, by that of the English child actor William Henry West Betty (“Master Betty”), styled the “Young Roscius” after the first-century BCE Roman actor. Betty began his acting career at the age of eleven and made his London debut in December of 1804 at Covent Garden where he drew “an immense crowd round all the doors at a very early hour.” According to one account of the performance, the boy actor “manifested powers, genius, and discrimination that [was] scarcely creditable.”¹¹ Betty went on to perform hundreds of shows, finding admirers in all quarters of Britain. William Hazlitt, for one, wrote that “Master Betty’s acting was a singular phenomenon, but it was also as beautiful as it was singular.”¹² Like the boy poet Chatterton, however, the boy actor did not always find mainstream support. In fact, the Morning Post for 5 December 1805 criticized the phenomenon of child actors, darkly labeling the performances in which they starred as “Infantine Theatricals.” According to the Morning Post, “Premature debaucheries, premature decrepitude, or premature death, have usually been the consequence of premature genius and premature abilities.” While these remarks may have been a politicized reaction to the recent institutionalization of child actors in Napoleonic France, the idea of “premature death” also recalled the fate of the young Chatterton. Other commentators were less morbid but equally concerned about the popularity of adolescent genius during the Romantic period. The Chester Chronicle for 12 March 1802, for instance, stated that it would not accept original “juvenile productions” for inclusion in its columns because they “are not fit for the public,” adding that adolescent authorship “generally throws a damp upon the ardour of the young mind, and prevents it in many instances from expanding into maturity.”

Despite the debate over Betty’s merits in particular and adolescent genius in general, the Young Roscius phenomenon had a decidedly powerful effect on young Byron and Hunt. Byron was fascinated by Betty, attending, “at the hazard of [his] life,” several uncomfortably packed performances in London in 1805. Byron’s opinion of the boy actor, however, was not a wholly approving one. He wrote to his half-sister, Augusta Leigh (née Byron), claiming that Betty was “tolerable in some characters, but by no means equal to the ridiculous praises showered upon him by John Bull” (BLJ 1:67). The impression also found its way into some of Byron’s juvenile poems. Although the poet acknowledged himself to be an “embryo Actor” (CPW 1:41, line 16) for his feature role in an amateur production of Richard Cumberland’s Wheel of Fortune, Byron mocked professional “Infant” actors:

The House is crammed in every place full

To see the Boy, of action Graceful;

While Roscius lends his name to Betty

Tully must yield the palm to Petty.

(CPW 1:196, lines 27–30)

For Paul Elledge, Byron’s comments on Betty suggest not disapproval but “unacknowledged or grudging and emulous respect, a mysterious and nagging fascination.”¹³ Whether Byron’s criticisms of the Young Roscius sprang from youthful jealousy or a desire for Betty-like celebrity, Byron had been clearly swept up in the vogue for adolescent genius that had also gripped Hunt.

Hunt, on more than one occasion, explicitly identified himself with Young Roscius and had commented publicly on the young actor’s career as early as 1805.¹⁴ When Hunt later reflected on his Juvenilia period, he recalled that after the volume appeared, he had been “introduced to literati, and shown about among parties,” having become a “kind of ‘Young Roscius’ in authorship” (A 1:194). In a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Note on the Texts
• Introduction: The Wren and the Eagle
• 1 Byron, Hunt, and the Juvenile Tradition
• 2 Early Satire: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and The Feast of the Poets
• 3 The Politics of Intimacy: Byron and The Examiner
• 4 The Story of Rimini: Annotating, Publishing, Reviewing
• 5 Byron and the Cockney School
• 6 Byron and Hunt in Italy: The Art of The Liberal
• Conclusion: “A Painful Retrospect”
• Bibliography
• Index