The Book that Nobody Reads: Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828)

This seminar is held in-person only.

Abstract:

From John Lockhart to Fiona MacCarthy, Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828) has been disparaged and dismissed — 'the miserable book of a miserable man'. So routine has this become that one suspects most have not bothered to read what Hunt's book actually says. Opening with Marilyn Butler's chapter ‘The Cult of the South: the Shelley circle, its creed and its influence,’ I want to consider how the ‘Marlow moment’ of  Spring 1817,  and its reveries about the Mediterranean, shaped the classicism of Hunt's Foliage (1818) and, more particularly, the narrative of   Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828). I aim to explore Hunt's book from several perspectives:  as a corrective to the idealistic ‘Cult of the South’ and to some ideas about Byron, and as a narrative that has some curiously modernist tendencies. We are all aware of Hunt's prized independence as editor of the Examiner, so perhaps we should reflect on  Hunt's words:  ‘I am not vindictive',  'I tell the truth'. What will emerge in the paper, I hope, is a more nuanced view of Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries as a prototype of modern biography, published long before Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians spurned ‘tedious panegyric’ and promoted biography that would shoot ‘a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses.’ As Hunt came to terms with Lord Byron and the actuality of ‘the South,’ the ‘Marlow moment' can be seen to have helped to shape Hunt's determination to ‘put an end to a great deal of false biography.’ That this meant Hunt would have to write ‘of necessity a painful retrospect’ is one compelling aspect of a complex and self-critical narrative that tells us of ‘a sense of mistake on both sides'.

Speaker:

Nicholas Roe is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of critically acclaimed biographies and studies including John Keats. A New Life, The First Life of Leigh Hunt, and The Politics of Nature.   Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Radical Years was republished in a thirtieth anniversary edition in 2018. His edited books include Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life and John Keats and Romantic Scotland. Forthcoming next year from Oxford University Press will be a new book, The Illustrious Afterlife of John Keats.