Abstract
The first time I saw Lord Byron, he was rehearsing the part of Leander, under the auspices of Mr Jackson,1 the prize-fighter. It was in the river Thames, before he went to Greece. I had been bathing, and was standing on the floating machine adjusting my clothes, when I noticed a respectable-looking manly person, who was eyeing something at a distance. This was Mr Jackson waiting for his pupil. The latter was swimming with somebody for a wager. I forget what his tutor said of him; but he spoke in terms of praise. I saw nothing in Lord Byron at that time, but a young man, who, like myself, had written a bad volume of poems; and though I had a sympathy with him on this account, and more respect for his rank than I was willing to suppose, my sympathy was not an agreeable one; so, contenting myself with seeing his Lordship’s head bob up and down in the water, like a buoy, I came away.
Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (Philadelphia, 1828) pp. 9–11
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Notes
James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), poet and essayist, was imprisoned in 1813 for libelling the Prince Regent in the Examiner, of which he was editor. His first meeting with Byron was in May of that year, when Byron and Tom Moore dined with him in prison. Later Shelley, apparently at Byron’s suggestion, invited Hunt to join them in Pisa to establish a new journal, the Liberal. Hunt arrived in July 1822 with his disgruntled wife and unruly children, and relations soon became strained. The first number of the l iberal appeared on 15 October 1822 and contained Byron’s Vision of Judgment; only three more issues of the periodical were published. Byron helped Hunt financially but the continued requests for more money wore out his patience and his generosity (Dickens thirty years later portrayed Hunt as Skimpole, the calculatingly irresponsible artist-sponger in Bleak House). Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries gives a very unfavourable portrait of Byron: S. C. Chew described it as ‘so distorted as to be scandalous’, and a contemporary reviewer wrote that ‘it is by much too bad … that [Byron’s] bones must be scraped up from their bed of repose to be at once grinned and howled over by creatures who, even in the least hyena-like of their moods, can touch nothing that mankind would wish to respect without polluting it’ — Quarterly Review, XXXVII (1828) 423–4. Hunt’s Autobiography (1850; rev. edn, 1860) admits that his earlier judgement was unfair, pleads youth as his excuse, and tones down the acerbity of the comments on Byron in many places: for instance, the phrase ‘a nobler look, than I ever knew him to have, before or since’ near the end of the above extract was revised to read ‘a very noble look …’. On Hunt, see biographies by Edmund Blunden (1930) and (in French) Louis Landré (1935–6); also William H. Marshall, Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and ‘The Liberal’ (Philadelphia, 1960).
Hunt’s Juvenilia (1801).
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© 1985 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Hunt, L. (1985). First Impressions III (1813). In: Page, N. (eds) Byron. Interviews and Recollections. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06632-2_11
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