ABSTRACT
In 1830s, Leigh Hunt’s main occupation was to edit, successively, the Chat of the Week and the Tatler, both of which died young. Leigh Hunt’s London Journal contained many reprints of past essays, enthusiastic mentions of past friends and examples of their work, the work of present friends like Thomas Carlyle and Savage Landor, and a heartfelt obituary, on 7 January 1835, to Charles Lamb. They had met 24 years before, in Hunt’s first periodical of literature and cheer, the Reflector. Hunt was acknowledged as ‘the father of the present penny and three half penny literature’; his beloved Indicator had successfully revived ‘something like the periodical literature of former days’, a formula repeated in the Companion and Tatler. R. H. Horne had just published such a play, The Death of Marlowe, which he respectfully dedicated to Hunt as one who had ‘long assisted largely and most successfully to educate the hearts and heads of both old and young’.
