The Wit in the Dungeon: The Remarkable Life of Leigh Hunt—Poet, Revolutionary, and the Last of the Romantics

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)