ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, VI, 14 February 1813, pp. 97–9. This article continues the thread of the previous week’s Political Examiner on the Hunt brothers’ trial, sentencing, and imprisonment (see above, pp. 277–82). For similar examples of Hunt’s audacious new mode of Eastern political allegory, featured in the second part of this essay, see The Examiner, VI, 3 January 1813, pp. 1–3; and The Examiner, IX, 14 January 1816, pp. 17–20 and Vol. 2, pp. 40–9. This Eastern allegory, pointing scornfully to the outrageous Oriental excess of the Regent’s Brighton Pavilion (see below, p. 383, n. 13) mocks Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough as a gluttonous Turkish judge named El-En-Burrah and the Prince Regent as a licentious sultan with the Cockney inflected name of ‘Jee Awj’. Such a brash parody marks the emergence of Hunt’s insolent Cockney identity, which developed out of his new style of personal representation in The Examiner (see headnote above, p. 277). Hunt’s persona of an insolent Cockney aesthete who tramples on social, class and aesthetic hierarchies acquired full shape after the first few difficult weeks of his incarceration. Soon after writing this article, he arranged to be moved with his wife and children into a two-room dwelling in the former prison infirmary where he went to work on crafting this new identity. He decorated his prison rooms with paintings, busts of poets, trellised wallpaper, a painted ceiling, a pianoforte, bookcases and flowers (for a full description of this improbable chamber rightly belonging in a ‘fairy tale’, as Charles Lamb described it, see Autobiography, vol. ii, p. 248). Hunt also held poetry readings, musical soirées, and various entertainments for such a stream of prominent visitors – including Byron, Moore, Edgeworth and Lamb, among many others – that his outlandish cavern soon became one of London’s more popular literary salons and liberal gathering points. Presiding over this aesthetic revelry as ‘the wit in the dungeon’ (Byron’s phrase; LJ, vol. iii, p. 49), Hunt would soon insert its subversive aura of Cockney bravura and aesthetic excess into the poetry he wrote in prison, particularly The Story of Rimini (Vol. 5, pp. 161–206). For a critical discussion of Hunt’s Cockney coterie and its politically-driven aesthetics, see Cox and Roe.
