English Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, British Authors - 19th Century - Literary Biography, Romanticism - Literary Movements, Political Prisoners - Biography, British Poets - Literary Biography, Journalists - Ne

The Wit in the Dungeon

Name: The Wit in the Dungeon
Author: Anthony Holden
ISBN: 9780316067522

by Anthony Holden

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Overview

"For a glowing half-century, Leigh Hunt orchestrated the literary life of London. Jailed in his midtwenties for insulting the Prince of Wales, Hunt transformed his prison cell into a veritable literary salon, hosting such famous sympathizers as Lord Byron, who dubbed him "the wit in the dungeon." Over the next several decades, while campaigning fearlessly for political reform and inventing theater criticism as we know it, Hunt became a major player in the Romantic movement and launched the careers of numerous poets whose names now overshadow his own. Publisher and friend to Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Lamb, and scores more, he was the center of a literary circle second to none. He was so close to Percy Bysshe Shelley that he fought with Mary Shelley over possession of the young poet's heart after his tragic drowning (though eventually Hunt settled for his best friend's jawbone)." "In this vivid new biography, Anthony Holden brings into focus a man whose gifts were surpassed only by the brilliance of his friends. Famous as a poet, a playwright, a literary and political essayist, an editor, and a critic, Hunt also had a talent for bringing out the best in great writers, a fearless outspokenness no matter what pressures were brought, and a genius friendship. His is a story of writing that matters, and a portrait of England's literary life across two great eras. Outliving his Romantic contemporaries, Hunt became an elder statesman of Victorian letters - companion and champion of Carlyle and Tennyson, Browning and Dickens - and was a candidate for the poet laureateship in his waning years." Hunt's remarkable story has never been fully told. Anthony Holden brings to life a pivotal moment in literary and political history - the world of England in the first half of the nineteenth century and the transition from the Romantics to the Victorians - and a man of undying vibrancy, originality, and style.

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Editorials

Megan Marshall

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. 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.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Holden, a veteran biographer of figures from Shakespeare to Prince Charles, delivers a colorful and eventful portrait of one of the longest-lived members of the Romantic era, whose chief accomplishment, besides his conviviality, may have been imprisonment for satirizing the Regent Prince of Wales in 1812. Hunt (1784-1859) won notoriety for his precocious adolescent poetry and later, with his brother, for their newspaper, the Examiner, which fought against Regency-era corruption. His friends and colleagues included Keats, Shelley, Byron, Hazlitt, Lamb, Carlyle, Browning and Dickens, his eventual nemesis. Holden views more favorably the middle-aged Hunt's belles-lettres potboiling and perpetual shortness of cash than did the popular Victorian novelist, who in Bleak House caricatured Hunt as the feckless Harold Skimpole. Hunt's poetry, tending to the florid and sentimental, made a relatively successful transition to the Victorian era, but his lasting achievements are likely the anthology favorites "Abou Ben Adhem" and "The Glove and the Lions," as well as the light verse "Jenny Kissed Me" (about Jane Welsh Carlyle). A man of letters who appears in many literary biographies, Hunt deserves this sympathetic, engaging one of his own. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Dec. 13) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Although literary critic, poet, and essayist Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) is now mostly forgotten, he was instrumental in launching the careers of poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, his reviews of plays established theater criticism as we know it, and his inner circle included Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb. Holden's (William Shakespeare: His Life and Works) splendid biography traces Hunt's life from his fiery youth-when Byron dubbed him "the wit in the dungeon"-to his rise as a man of letters and a publisher. Although Hunt drank heavily the draughts of Romantic sensibility when it came to the role of nature, the function of the poet, and the glory of liberty and equality, Holden points out that he and his circle eventually outgrew the Romantics to embrace Alfred Lord Tennyson (whom Hunt called "a genuine young poet...our best living poet, next to Wordsworth"), the Brontes, and Charles Dickens. Holden engagingly offers a first-rate history of 19th-century England as well as the definitive complete biography of Hunt. (Nicholas Roe's Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt, which has been recently published in the U.K., covers the first half of Hunt's life.) Sixteen pages of black-and-white photographs are included. Strongly recommended for all libraries.-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.