ABSTRACT
Thornton Hunt, Leigh Hunt’s eldest son, is now best known as the man by whom Agnes Lewes, the wife of George Eliot’s partner G. H. Lewes, had four children. His marginal role in the story of the relationship between Lewes and Eliot is, in fact, of some relevance to this memoir. For Lewes and Hunt, who were friends and co-founders of a periodical called The Leader, were both admirers of Shelley and sympathised with his ideals of free love. The American readership of Hunt’s article would not have known it, but the author was himself living with a woman who was not his wife, and who was hrself married to another man. It is difficult for the reader now not to think that this shaped Hunt’s treatment of Shelley’s relationships with Mary and Harriet. It is his entirely unevidenced claim that, after Shelley had left his first wife for Mary Godwin, ‘Harriet remained in amicable correspondence with Shelley: and not only so, but, while she altogether abstained from opposing his new connection, she was actually on friendly terms with Mary’ (Hunt, ‘Shelley’, Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1863, p. 195). He must do all that he can to persuade others, and perhaps himself, that members of the Westbrook family, hoping to profit from her marriage to Shelley, were to blame for Harriet’s misery and that Shelley and Mary both demonstrated all proper ‘compassion’ for ‘the unfortunate girl’.
