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Percy Bysshe Shelley
The page featuring Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Leigh Hunt Hair Book
The English Romantic poet, playwright, and essayist Percy Bysshe Shelley was Hunt’s dearest and most intimate friend. It was Shelley who pursued the acquaintance after reading Hunt’s journalism, particularly that which criticized the Prince of Wales. Hunt’s trial and conviction for seditious libel was well-publicized, in part by Hunt himself, who kept writing and editing for the Examiner from inside Surrey Gaol. From Oxford, where he was attending the university but would soon face expulsion for his essay The Necessity of Atheism, Shelley took notice of Hunt and wrote to him (Roe 138). Though Hunt did not reply, Shelley persisted, and the pair met in the spring of 1811, with Hunt’s father-in-law, Rowland Hunter, facilitating the introduction (Holden 48).
Hunt and Shelley
Hunt and Shelley’s friendship built slowly at first, but deepened rapidly after the suicide of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, in 1816. During this time, Shelley lodged with the Hunt family as he sought information about Harriet’s death (Holden 107). Hunt’s deep attachment to Shelley was forged during this time of intense vulnerability, and Shelley seems to have fully reciprocated Hunt’s affection. Shelley and Hunt viewed “male friendship as an exalted attachment” and found in each other an ideal and idealized partner (Roe 287). Hunt’s intimacy with Shelley apparently caused strain to his other relationships, including that with his wife Marianne and sister-in-law Bess (Roe 292). But Shelley was fond of Hunt’s children and was particularly close to Hunt’s eldest son Thornton, with whom he often played imaginative games (Holden 110). Hunt eventually named his fifth child after Shelley (Holden 132). Shelley later dedicated his play The Cenci to Hunt (Roe 319).
Hunt and Shelley
The professional aspect of Hunt and Shelley’s relationship intensified with the growing intimacy of their personal bond. Hunt’s periodicals the Examiner and the Indicator provided publication venues for Shelley, whose combination of the political and the poetical in works such as The Revolt of Islam appealed to Hunt. His glowing review of the poem positioned Shelley as the realization of the untapped revolutionary potential Hunt found in the poetry of the Lake School. Shelley shared Hunt’s view that Wordsworth’s ideal of solitary poetic genius amounted to little more than a model of self-absorbed egotism, as Shelley’s Alastor illustrates (Roe 259). Hunt took to the Examiner again to counter a scathing review of Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam in the Quarterly Review, a journal edited by the conservative William Gifford, of whom Hunt had made an enemy by both satirically targeting him in The Feast of the Poets and attacking his misogynistic treatment of the writer Mary Robinson (Holden 126). Hunt’s defense of Shelley’s poem was likely motivated by sincere sentiments, even as Shelley also provided Hunt much-needed financial assistance. Hunt was aware of Shelley’s refusal of his father’s design on him to become a statesman in the House of Commons, as well as the financial sacrifice that decision entailed (Holden 47). Nevertheless, Shelley financially supported Hunt a good deal during his lifetime, and he set up an annuity, which started long after Shelley’s own death, with the death of Shelley’s father (Holden 109).
Hunt and Shelley
Once Percy and Mary Shelley left for Italy in 1818, Shelley and Hunt frequently exchanged letters over the course of their four years apart. Shelley wrote to Hunt en route to Italy to express his feelings about being separated from his friend, telling Hunt, “‘I confess that the thought of how long we may be divided makes me very melancholy’” (qtd. in Holden 132). In subsequent letters, Shelley was insistent that Hunt and his family join him in Italy, but, owing to Hunt’s financial limitations, it wasn’t until Shelley had developed a business proposition with Byron that the trio start the journal that became the Liberal that Hunt agreed to make the journey. Supported by loans from both Shelley and Byron, Hunt and his family did, after a series of travel setbacks, relocate from England to Italy to join his friends and new business partners. Hunt’s joyful reunion with his friend was cut short when just a few days after his arrival, Shelley died at sea.
Shelley’s Death: Before departing for his boat, the Don Juan, Shelley had borrowed Hunt’s copy of Keats’s last volume of poetry, and it was this book, found in Shelley’s pocket, that enabled the identification of Shelley’s body after he drowned when his boat capsized in a storm (Roe 347). Hunt, along with Byron and their friend Edward Trelawny, built a funeral pyre for Shelley. Somehow Shelley’s heart, however, was not incinerated, and Hunt reportedly begged Trelawny to allow him to keep it (Roe 348). Hunt even resisted Mary Shelley’s request for the heart, on the grounds that he knew the couple had been having marital difficulties prior to Shelley’s death, but Byron interceded on Mary’s behalf and successfully convinced Hunt to give over Shelley’s heart. Hunt had also taken a jawbone from the ashes, which he kept on his desk as a memento of his best friend. Hunt’s grandson donated Shelley’s jawbone to the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome (Holden 166).
Hunt’s retention of material relics from Shelley’s body, such as his jawbone and lock of hair, suggests that Hunt found Shelley’s presence to linger in these items, which presumably helped ease Hunt’s grief. In a biography of Hunt, Nicholas Roe notes that “after Shelley’s death Hunt would insist that he remained spiritually present to him” (319). Evidence for this continued presence appears in Hunt’s own writing as well: in his essay on Shelley in Imagination and Fancy, Hunt explains that Shelley’s name held the power to send Hunt on “a transport of love and gratitude” (100). Furthermore, in a letter to his and Shelley’s mutual friend Horace Smith just days after Shelley’s body was found, Hunt offers Smith “a morsel of a lock of his hair, if you have none,” suggesting that the presence of such an item would function as a synecdoche to console Shelley’s grieving friend (Hunt, Selected Writings 174). The lock of Shelley’s hair in Hunt’s Hair Book thus communicates Hunt’s intense attachment to his intimate friend in addition to his reverence for Shelley’s literary merits.
