ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, VI, 17 January 1813, pp. 33–6. At the beginning of 1813, the state of the Examiner and the ‘civilized world’, as Hunt ironically termed it in this title, 1ooked foreboding. Sentence had yet to be passed on the Hunt brothers following their conviction for libel the previous month (see above, pp. 262–7), but they were bracing for serious consequences. That personal and political setback on their own local level seemed indicative of even more ominous rollbacks on the global scene. Hunt’s opening Political Examiner for 1813 (3 January, pp. 1–3) indicates his sensitivity to a more repressive political atmosphere in its unusually evasive strategies: the essay is untitled, extremely rare among Political Examiners, and it delivers its commentary through an indirect, though rollicking, Oriental allegory on the vices of the Prince Regent, the corruption of his ministers and the resulting devastation of the island of ‘Hing’ (as in ‘Hing Land’). Concerned about the impact of his writings on the sentencing decision, Hunt nevertheless refused to back down on his primary claim in the current article: that corruption and reactionary policies on the home-front threaten to undermine the welfare of the nation and, considering England’s global reach, the health of the world. That global scene may have looked like a bleak dungeon in January. Yet Hunt continued to ‘take heart’ (p. 270) in signs of improvement, such as the abolition of the slave trade and the improvement of education (see above, pp. 178–82, and below, pp. 289–92), and he remained determined to seek reform through ongoing political critique. His most intriguing insight into the possibilities of reform in these dark times comes in his conclusion to the ‘State of the Civilized World’ essay, which emphasizes the detrimental effects of Napoleon’s tyrannical government on the arts and, by implication, suggests the strong capacity of literature to collude with or fight against political oppression.
