The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt (review)

British Romanticism has come to seem increasingly inseparable from its writers' public engagements with sociability, theatricality, cultural criticism, and political debate. Leigh Hunt, editor of the radical Examiner newspaper (1808-21), theatrical and literary critic, prolific essayist, and leader of the so-called 'Cockney School of Poetry,' was in no small measure the instigator and chronicler of these engagements. 'One of the most pressing obligations of the present edition,' the general editors write, 'has been to collect and present an oeuvre which finally reveals Leigh Hunt as, unmistakably, one of the leading writers of his age.' They have met this obligation admirably and are justified in claiming the result to be 'the most comprehensive and thoroughly annotated edition of his work to date.' The edition reproduces materials from every aspect and phase of Hunt's long career, presenting him 'as editor, reviewer, critic, poet, satirist, cicerone, aesthete, essayist, radical, and much else.'

The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt fills the need for a thoroughly annotated, contemporary selected edition. Anyone who has spent time with Hunt's vast and various output will immediately recognize the challenges faced by his prospective editor. Hunt's writings are widely scattered throughout a range of books and periodicals, and our most recent editions consist of three volumes published between 1949 and 1962. The present edition is far more expansive, and it not only adds two much-needed volumes of Hunt's poetry but is careful to insist upon and illustrate the 'cross-fertilization' between his numerous personae and activities. The editors' introductions (volumes 1, 3, 4, and 5) are detailed, provocative, and lively, each positioning Hunt's work, suggesting ways in which we could 'read Hunt on his own terms,' and offering arguments for his significance within Romantic or early Victorian culture. Volume 1 provides a chronology, and each volume includes its own useful (and surprisingly extensive) biographical directory. Headnotes for each item give details of first publication, indicate subsequent reprints, introduce the source book or periodical, describe publication history, and place the item in relation to other work by Hunt and his circle as well as to contemporary events and incidents in Hunt's life. The endnotes are similarly thorough, elucidating context and identifying Hunt's extensive quotations and allusions. Volume 6 includes the index.

The chief editorial distinction of the edition is that each volume reprints items chronologically and in their entirety as they appeared in their various journals, newspapers, or books. A thematic arrangement would have reinforced the very separation of Hunt's interests, topics, and approaches which the editors commendably seek to remove. As Greg Kucich and Jeffrey N. Cox, the editors of volumes 1 and 2, write, 'Hunt's corpus tends to break down the barriers between the journalistic and the literary, the central and the marginal, the textual and the contextual.' Because the items are reprinted chronologically, even sections of a continuous article appear separately, thus allowing the reader to see how different concerns and topics mediate one another within Hunt's publications. Thus...