ABSTRACT

First published in The News, I, 19 May 1805, p. 6. With this opening of the Theatricals section in the first issue of The News, Leigh Hunt began a three-year run of nearly unbroken drama reviewing which established him as a well-known public journalist. He was not completely inexperienced in journalism at this point, having contributed in his youth some occasional essays to an evening newspaper, The Traveller, and he had been an enthusiastic theatregoer for several years, which helps explain why his brother, John Hunt, gave him the job of writing the Theatricals section for The News. Trained as a printer and passionately committed to the cause of political reform, John Hunt had been trying throughout the previous year to establish a newspaper with a liberal political agenda and realized his goal with this first issue of The News in May 1805. An eight-page weekly, it was published on Sunday mornings and featured a lead political essay followed by various reports on domestic and international news, London events, provincial activities and financial transactions, as well as a section titled ‘Theatricals’ dedicated to reviews of performances on the London stage. This format, with Leigh Hunt writing all but ‘six or eight’ (see below, p. 22) of the drama reviews on a weekly basis for three years, would offer the Hunt brothers a blueprint for the expanded and more famous venture they launched in 1808, The Examiner. (Their involvement with The News ended in 1808, though the paper continued for decades afterward.) Hunt’s theatrical writings for The News have never been reprinted, other than some excerpts included in Critical Essays and in Dramatic Essays by Leigh Hunt, eds. William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (London: Walter Scott, Ltd., 1894). They are rarely even mentioned in studies of his voluminous drama criticism. The selection here thus offers new insights into Hunt’s development as a major drama critic (he would publish over six hundred theatrical essays) as well as his growth several years later into a forceful political writer.