ABSTRACT
Leigh Hunt’s admiring portrait of Shelley is also testimony to Shelley’s admiration of Hunt, whom he always looked up to as a campaigner for ‘Liberty’. Indeed, it was politics that first drew the two together. On March 2nd, 1811, some three weeks before he was sent down from Oxford, Shelley wrote from University College to ‘Leigh Hunt, Editor of The Examiner, London’. He wished to congratulate ‘one of the most fearless enlighteners of the public mind at the present time’ on the ‘triumph’ of his acquittal on charges of libel brought by the goverment (he had published an article on the brutality of corporal punishment in the army) (Jones, Letters, I, p. 54). Shelley, at his most forward when he thought that he had detected a fellow-thinker, enclosed an ‘address’ on the subject of organizing ‘a methodical society’ that would resist ‘the enemies of liberty’ and promote ‘rational liberty’. A couple of months later, he was proudly telling Hogg that he had been invited to breakfast with Hunt, who was clearly more flattered than alarmed by his introduction of himself. He earnestly reported his attempts to persuade Hunt out of Deism and into Atheism: ‘Hunt is a man of cultivated mind, & certainly exalted notions; – I do not entirely despair of rescuing him out of this damnable heresy from Reason’ (Jones, Letters, I, p. 77). Hunt’s wife, Marianne, he added, was ‘a most sensible woman, she is by no means a Xtian, & rather atheistically given’.
