Hunt, JAMES HENRY LEIGH, poet and essayist, was born at Southgate, near Edmonston, on 19th October 1784. His father, Isaac Hunt (1752–1809), a Barbadian, being driven by the Revolution from Philadelphia to London, gave up law for the church, but lapsed into bankruptcy and Universalism. Leigh Hunt spent eight years at Christ's Hospital, and left at fifteen as first 'Deputy-Grecian,' debarred by a stammer from further promotion. He was a clerk first under one brother, an attorney, and next for four years in the War Office, writing meanwhile much dramatic criticism; in 1808 with another brother, a printer, he set up the Examiner; and in 1809 wedded Marianne Kent (1788–1857). The Examiner's tone was Radical, and, after several government prosecutions in 1813 for a libel on the Prince Regent (he had called him a 'corpulent Adonis of fifty'), Leigh Hunt was sentenced to a fine of £500 and to two years' imprisonment in Surrey gaol. There he 'scattered urbanity,' played battle-dore with his children, received hosts of visitors, and turned his cage into a 'bower of roses.' In November 1821 with his wife and seven children he sailed for Italy, but landed at Leghorn only on 1st July. He went on Shelley's invitation to help him and Byron to found the quarterly Liberal. Just a week later Shelley was drowned; Leigh Hunt and 'my noble friend' failed somehow to pull together; the Liberal died in its fourth number; and by 1825 the family was back at Highgate. Changes of residence, to Upper Cheyne Row, Chelsea, in 1833, to the 'old court suburb' of Kensington in 1840, and to Hammersmith in 1853—these are thenceforth the chief events in Leigh Hunt's life. It was one of ceaseless activity and as ceaseless embarrassment, for he 'never knew his multiplication table.' From 1844, however, Sir Percy Shelley allowed him £120 a year, and in 1847 he received a pension of £200. He died on a visit to Putney, 28th August 1859.
The 'Cockney poets,' so the critics dubbed Keats and Leigh Hunt. That the two should ever thus have been bracketed may now seem strange, for Leigh Hunt's poetry now is little known. And yet it is better than much, maybe most, of the newer poetic vogue. Its charm lies in a prettiness as of childhood; its wit and cleverness and wine-like sparkle have ever a smack of precocity. Narrative verse is his forte, his foible jauntiness. His translations are among the choicest of their kind; he transports the southern vintages to England, and their colour and flavour improve instead of losing by the voyage. As his poems, so his prose; his essays are always worth reading, but only after the Essays of Elia. Leigh Hunt's writings, indeed, are less memorable than his friendships—with Keats and Shelley, as also with Lamb, Byron, Moore, Coleridge, Dickens, Carlyle, and a whole galaxy of lesser luminaries. Our knowledge of them, and especially the first two, is largely derived from his.
In his excellent List of the Writings of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt (1868) Mr Alexander Ireland chronologically arranges with notes, &c., seventy-nine works by the latter, including Juvenilia (1801), The Feast of the Poets (1814), The Story of Rimini (1816), Foliage (1818), Captain Sword and Captain Pen (1835), and The Palfrey (1842); besides much in prose, as Lord Byron and his Contemporaries (1828), Sir Ralph Esher (1832), Imagination and Fancy (1844), Wit and Humour (1846), Stories of the Italian Poets (1846), A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla (1848), and The Old Court Suburb (1855). See Leigh Hunt's Autobiography (3 vols. 1850; revised ed. 1860) and Correspondence (2 vols. 1862), Forster's Life of Dickens (for the unkindly 'Harold Skimpole' episode), a capital article in the Cornhill (i. 1860), and one by Prof. Dowden in Ward's English Poets (iv. 1880); and sketches by Cosmo Monkhouse (1893) and B. Johnson (1896).