The ‘poetical Tinkerdom!’, Leigh Hunt’s own room upstairs, was predictably arranged with care: ‘no perturbation was to enter, except to calm itself with religious and cheerful thoughts’. With two decent chairs, a bookcase and writing table, the ‘noble Hunt’ received guests ‘in the spirit of a king’. The Hunts lived in the country at Epsom, poverty having forced them to abandon the pleasant Highgate house in 1828. Illness compounded the poverty. Hunt was chronically ill but able to work. Marianne, though less consumptive, was ill in other ways. The shoddy cottage at Epsom called for some consolation. Hunt spent the autumn of 1829 there in nervous crisis, writing Sir Ralph Esher, a fictitious autobiography of a nobleman in the time of Charles II, promised to Colburn in regular monthly parts. He was to be paid 20 guineas an instalment and it was eventually published anonymously in three volumes in 1832.