ABSTRACT
Leigh Hunt admitted that he experienced “involuntary” feelings of “spleen and indignation” as he composed the lengthy Lord Byron portion of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (LBSC). The Byron portion of LBSC, which focused on “imperfections” and what Hunt called “disagreeable truths”, would seem to confirm Wordsworth’s reservations about the dangers of Romantic biography couched in the rhetoric of “Truth.” In the former, Hunt made brief mention of a “letter” of Byron’s that he wished to show Colburn. Hunt’s self-consciousness about Byron’s rank inevitably returns to the dedication to Byron in The Story of Rimini that Hunt wrote and published in 1816. The present study of the Byron-Hunt friendship and literary relationship has made an attempt to address what Gates sees as this “one-sided view of Hunt” with respect to Byron by suggesting that there were meaningful and complex tensions at work in the Byron-Hunt relationship.
