ABSTRACT
Leigh Hunt’s recollections had been of prison and of the ‘game of rackets’ punctuated by rowdy songs and drunken oaths. Hunt’s parade of loneliness was no exaggeration. The warmth and security of Marianne and the children was a prop of his existence. On 5 February 1813 he submitted a petition to the prison governor describing his ‘violent attacks of illness accompanied with palpitations of the heart and other nervous afflictions’. Hunt parcelled out his day in rituals and routines which kept him busy and secure. He wrote, he embarked on useful study at appointed times, and he went to his poetry writing as ‘regular as clockwork’. Marianne and the children had intended to go to Brighton for a mere few weeks, but they did not return to Surrey Gaol until three months later. During the separation Hunt complained constantly of smothering depression and deprivation, but more often it is with Marianne’s sufferings that the reader’s sympathies lie.
