ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, VI, 7 February 1813, pp. 81–3. This was the first of Hunt’s many Examiner publications from Horsemonger Lane Gaol, dramatically issued just four days after his incarceration. Nearly two months after the guilty libel verdict was pronounced at the trial of the Hunt brothers on 9 December 1812, Lord Chief Lord Ellenborough pronounced sentence on 3 February 1813. The Hunt brothers were committed to two-year prison sentences in different jails to commence immediately (John at Coldbath Fields Prison and Leigh at Horsemonger Lane Gaol). In addition, they were fined £500 each and required to give security of another £500 each for their good behaviour following their release. The blow was much heavier than expected, as Hunt recounts in his Autobiography (vol. ii, p. 135), especially the separation of the two brothers. Hunt’s initial days in prison were harrowing, fraught with illness, an ongoing nervous disorder, and the grim sounds and sights of life behind bars. He rebounded quickly, though, and began developing strategies of resistance. Struck by the relation between his own encounter with government despotism and the general plight of the nation, he brought a new form of personal display to his Political Examiners. (He was allowed to continue writing for the paper and, though his Theatrical Criticism had to be suspended, he rarely missed his weekly Political Examiner during the prison years.) His first three Political Examiners from prison, including this essay, attack the mockery of justice in his trial and detail his own personal hardships along with the sufferings of his family. To highlight this display of self, he complemented his usual signature at the end of the article (the Indicator finger) with his full name in block capitals, ‘LEIGH HUNT’. This type of self-revelation would help foment the explosive personal invectives of the periodical wars with Blackwoods and ‘Z’ several years later (see The Examiner, X, 14 December 1817, p. 788, and Vol. 2, pp. 142–3). It also gave rise to a new public persona, Hunt as the insolent Cockney aesthete, which would condition the writing and social practices of the second-generation romantic era writers now beginning to gather around him. For more details on this Cockney development, see headnote below, p. 283. For information on the prosecution and trial of 1812, see headnote above, pp. 262–3. For Hunt’s ongoing commentary on the trial sentence and his prison experience, see the Political Examiners for 14 February 1813, pp. 97–9 and below, pp. 283–8; 21 February 1813, pp. 113–14; 28 February 1813, pp. 129–30; 6 February 1814, pp. 81–2.
