ABSTRACT
When Leigh Hunt composed his Autobiography, he was a different writer from the hard-up father of a young family (he had seven children) whom the publisher Colburn had once pressured into turning a would-be autobiography into a book centred on Byron (see the headnotes to Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries in both this volume and in C. Hart, Byron). Not only was his Autobiography written with some of the reflectiveness of age (Hunt was by this time in his mid-sixties), but also with the belated mellowness that came with his achievement of modest financial security. On Sir Timothy Shelley’s death in 1844, Sir Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley’s son, honoured his father’s wish to settle an income (£120 per annum) on Hunt, and in 1847 he was granted a civil list pension of £200 per annum. He was established as a Victorian man of letters, and was over the keen money worries by which he and, perhaps even more, his wife Marianne had been dominated for most of their married life. At last, reflectiveness was in order.
