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.