Micawber with a touch of Skimpole

Biographers, in their desperate search for a suitable subject hitherto undiscovered by their professional colleagues, sometimes light on a figure once well known, but who has fallen into disrepute. Such was the fate of Leigh Hunt, now resurrected in these two books. Anthony Holden is a professional biographer whose subjects have ranged from Olivier and the Prince of Wales to Tchaikovsky. Using the abundant written sources of the epoch, he has produced a long, well-researched life of Hunt from his fame as a schoolboy poet in 1800 to his death in 1859. Professor Roe is a distinguished literary critic and historian of the Romantic movement. His learned and perceptive book ends in August 1822 with the cremation of Shelley’s decomposed body on the beach of Viareggio.

Both authors have to confront Hunt’s reputation as chronic debtor sponging on his friends and as victim of an unfortunate marriage. As a schoolboy prodigy, with his Juvenilia, a collection of conventional poetry, he attracted the attention of Bess Kent, a proletarian blue-stocking. But he fell sexually in love with the thin waist and ample bosom of her 15-year-old sister, Marianne. He married her in 1809. Marriages based solely on sexual attraction are doomed. Too late Hunt discovered the rival attractions of Bess and embarked on what seems to have been a ménage à trois. He shared his admirer Shelley’s advocacy of free love and open marriage: ‘marriage was an experiment,’ he told Carlyle, ‘which can hardly be said to have succeeded in the world’, concluding that ‘all women should submit to the infidelities of their husbands without feeling insulted’. Not surprisingly perhaps, Marianne took to the bottle, pestering Hunt’s friends behind his back for funds to finance her addiction.

His ambiguous relationship with Bess led to accusations of incest. But what has permanently sullied his reputation is the chronic indebtedness that turned him into a sponger on friends and acquaintances.