BIOGRAPHY: Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled LivesBy Daisy Hay, Bloomsbury, 384pp. £20
THE MYTH of the Romantic poet as a solitary genius has long been replaced in academic circles by a more comprehensive view of an early 19th-century literary culture that thrived on a variety of networks, associations, coteries and friendships. Studies of groups such as the Godwin-Shelley circle, the Holland House set, the Lake Poets and the Cockney School are now almost as plentiful as books on individual authors or thematic concerns; and biographies such as William St Clair's The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (1989) and John Worthen's The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in 1802(2001) equally register the established scholarly interest in group lives.
Daisy Hay cannot, therefore, claim to have single-handedly shattered the myth of Romantic isolationism, but she has written a highly readable account of Romantic-era group dynamics that may more fully demolish that myth in the popular domain. Her book Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Livesfocuses on the so-called "second generation" of Romantic writers who gravitated towards Leigh Hunt, a poet and editor of the political weekly the Examiner, including such figures as Lord Byron, William Hazlitt, John Keats, Charles and Mary Lamb, and Percy and Mary Shelley.
It was Hunt's 1812 article 'The Prince on St Patrick's Day' that established him as a minor celebrity by bringing him and his brother John a two-year prison sentence for calling the Prince Regent a 'corpulent gentleman of fifty . . . without one single claim on the gratitude of his country'. As the literary critic Nicholas Roe has demonstrated, the piece was prompted by an Irish charity dinner in London where the Regent was condemned as "a clencher of Irish chains". Hunt's sympathies for Ireland sprung from his own supposed descent from the ancient kings of Ireland; and George Cruickshank's famous image of Hunt shackled in chains , A Free-Born Englishman, therefore not only represents Hunt's imprisonment at the hands of an increasingly repressive government, but is also suggestive of his vision of himself as an oppressed Irishman.
The sympathetic response of like-minded radicals and reformers to the brothers' imprisonment was to have an important effect on Hunt's political thought. In contrast to what he saw as the self-interested introspection of the Lake Poets, he promoted the principle of co-operative "sociability", investing the rituals of friendship and domesticity with ideological significance. The Examineraccordingly included collaborative columns, letters from friends and contributions from a diverse range of acquaintances, a tactic that was not lost on more conservative reviewers such as JG Lockhart of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, who launched a series of vicious attacks on the group he snobbishly dubbed the "Cockney School": "None of the Cockneys are men of genius – none of them are men of solitary meditative habits: they are . . . the editors for Sunday papers and so forth".
Formerly relegated to a marginal role in biographies of Byron, Shelley and Keats, the "King of the Cockneys" has clearly gained from the revisionist tendencies of contemporary Romantic studies. Two biographies of Hunt appeared in 2005: Anthony Holden's The Wit in the Dungeonand Nicholas Roe's Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt, both of which locate him at the centre of Romantic literary culture. Despite his absence from the book's title, Hunt also emerges as one of the central figures of Hay's account, which cleverly links the many figures it considers by examining their generous reactions to Hunt's imprisonment. Whether or not the case for Hunt's centrality has been over-played of late, knowing more about Romanticism's middle-class metropolitan roots has substantially reinvigorated Romantic studies in the last two decades.
IMPECCABLY RESEARCHEDand written, Hay's book manages to synthesise these kinds of scholarly arguments while simultaneously weaving between the life stories of various figures, particularly those of the Hunt and Shelley families. Despite containing little new information for the specialist reader, the book successfully interrogates the self-fashionings of Hunt, Shelley and Byron by focusing more closely and sympathetically on the women in their lives, such as Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont and Elizabeth ("Bess") Kent. Hay tackles, for example, both Hunt's public persona as editor of the Examinerand his complex personal life. Although his marriage to Marianne Kent was life-long and seemingly passionate, Hunt was equally attached to his sister-in-law Bess Kent, who shared his prison accommodation for nearly two years. It is possible that the relationship between Hunt and Bess was consummated, which may explain Bess's suicide attempt at the Hampstead ponds in February 1817, just weeks after Shelley's pregnant wife, Harriet Westbrook, drowned herself in the Serpentine.
Such coincidences are, as Hay so effectively demonstrates, many: Keats and Shelley were buried in the same graveyard in Rome; Shelley drowned with a copy of Keats’s poems in his pocket; and Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont competed for Shelley’s affections in a way that paralleled the relationship between Hunt and the Kent sisters. Hay does not, however, descend to cliché: this is a book as much about Peterloo, the Queen Caroline affair and oppositional politics as it is about free love or any of the more salacious elements of Romantic biography; and it is able seamlessly to combine conventional biographical information with contextual detail about history and politics. For anyone interested in the intertwined lives of the younger Romantics, Hay’s account provides a vivid and entertaining outline of their lives and works, as well as an informative overview of the tempestuous politics surrounding the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath.
Porscha Fermanis is a lecturer in 18th-century and Romantic literature at University College Dublin. Her book, John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2009
