Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt
by Nicholas Roe
Pimlico £14.99, 428 pages

The Wit in the Dungeon: A Life of Leigh Hunt
by Anthony Holden
Little, Brown £20, 417 pages

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), poet, campaigning journalist, editor, critic, playwright and essayist, has been best remembered (when remembered at all) as friend and memorialist of literary men greater than himself: Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt and Lamb, for example. Not for almost three-quarters of a century has there been a full re-evaluation of his life and literary achievements. Now, published simultaneously, we have two new biographies of this extremely interesting though relatively minor literary figure; the first by the scholar Nicholas Roe, which ends rather abruptly two-thirds of the way through Hunt’s life, and the second by Anthony Holden, a professional biographer who has in the past given us lives of such glittering figures as Laurence Olivier, Prince Charles, Tchaikovsky and William Shakespeare.

Hunt’s antecedents were exotic enough - his father was from Barbados and his mother from Quaker stock in Philadelphia. “He had West Indian blood and a Quaker conscience,” as Hunt’s son Thornton once wrote. Hunt’s racially mixed blood would be used against him by his enemies with unsparing viciousness. His earliest memories were of the debtors’ prison in Southwark - his clergyman father, like his literary son after him, would be in and out of debt, which contributed to the nervous instability from which the younger Hunt suffered throughout his life. Supremely impractical, Hunt told his family that he was fit to be nothing but an author - and so he remained, tirelessly productive in many different fields, from first to last.

Hunt’s most important professional partnership was with his elder brother John, who became a publisher of newspapers and journals. Leigh became a respected and independent-minded drama reviewer in an age of bland puffery and oily sycophancy. In 1808 the brothers co-operated to launch a long-running weekly newspaper, The Examiner. Leigh would be its editor and chief contributor. It proved to be the making of his reputation as a dangerously radical political journalist. The young Hunt was ferociously courageous in his defence of radical causes - the abolition of slavery, civil rights for Catholics, parliamentary reform, etc - and just as fearless in his condemnation of courtly corruption. In 1813 he fell foul of the Prince Regent, the future George IV, and served two years in prison for publishing “scandalous and defamatory” libels.

Both biographies lavish time and attention upon the two years that Leigh Hunt spent in the Surrey jail. And what happened there was indeed astonishing and bizarre in the extreme. Hunt was allowed to transform his prison cell into a kind of literary salon. He papered the walls and brought in busts of his favourite authors. He presided over literary soirees, with much “merriment after dinner”.

A friend visited him with weekly baskets of wild flowers, fruits and vegetables. Charles Lamb was a regular visitor. Byron called too, and sent books and pheasants. It felt like a remarkably secure little world, more secure than the world beyond the locked gates.

Alongside Hunt’s dedication to politics ran an equally passionate love of poetry, and of the English poets in particular - Lamb associated the idea of English poetry with freedom itself. Hunt wrote poetry throughout his life, but it was very variable in quality. Sometimes it could be needlessly florid and overburdened with quaint locutions. On other occasions it was refreshingly direct and conversational. Interestingly, it is the professional biographer, Anthony Holden, who seems more certain and more courageous in his assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Hunt as a poet. Roe, the literary scholar, tends to pussyfoot somewhat, to give Hunt the benefit of the doubt when he perhaps doesn’t deserve it.

Hunt is, if anything, better known as a champion of other poets than as a poet in his own right. He helped to get Keats into print, and published many of his poems. He wrote judicious and far-sighted criticism of Wordsworth. He recognised the brilliance of Shelley.

Shelley plays an important role in these two biographies, because Hunt’s relationship with the young aristocrat was the most intense of his life, and the manner of Shelley’s death at sea the greatest single tragedy. Hunt was in Italy when Shelley died. He saw him off on that last fateful voyage back to Lerici. After the solemnity of the funeral pyre on the beach, Hunt was involved in an unseemly wrangle with Shelley’s widow over who should be the rightful owner of his heart - eventually Hunt had to settle for a portion of the jawbone.

Who has written the better biography? Roe’s portrait is steeped in background - the political ferment of the first two decades of the 19th century is meticulously rendered. Holden’s book is more relaxed and more self-consciously literary - in the author’s opinion, Holden belongs to that same literary fraternity to which Hunt belonged. Roe is a more modest toiler in literature’s vineyard.

Roe breaks off his biography when Hunt’s life has almost three decades to run because he regards the earlier decades as the period in which Hunt achieved the most. The remainder, in his opinion, represent a gentle decline. Hunt, the longest-lived survivor of a great generation of Romantic poets, felt less at home in a mercantile Victorian world. This is frustrating for the reader. We want to know how the story ended, even if told in brief. Holden supplies us with the end of that story, and he undoubtedly pads and stretches. But he also gives us some fascinating new material - Hunt’s relationship with Dickens, for example, and how, for all his sunny and forgiving nature, Hunt could never quite bring himself to forgive his old friend for having depicted him as Harold Skimpole in Bleak House.

And yet, in part, what Dickens wrote was true. Hunt remained a freeloading child-man throughout his life - and a great occasional essayist, a remarkable campaigning journalist and a passably good poet into the bargain.