Fairies, Nymphs, and Ogres: Leigh Hunt

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was an English critic, essayist, and poet. Although today his reputation is overshadowed by that of his contemporaries--such as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, and Alfred Tennyson, all of whom Hunt introduced to the public--he was (as one reviewer put it) remarkable among them "for his purity and elevation." In like manner, a reviewer praised "kind-hearted, genial, generous Leigh Hunt," asking: "Who ever read a page of his without feeling more cheerful and hopeful, without cherishing for the author, and humanity generally, a larger sympathy and affection?"

He was known not only for his playful wit and elegant prose, but also his candor. With his brother he co-founded the The Examiner, an intellectual English newspaper devoted to independent reporting and radical reformist principles. The paper's criticisms of British royalty and politics resulted in a series of high-profile prosecutions of the editors, and the Hunts were eventually sentenced to two years in prison. Later, Leigh attempted to establish a new quarterly magazine in Italy, but the unexpected death of Percy Bysshe Shelley (on whom he had become financially dependent) left him temporarily stranded in that country. (His presence at Shelley's funeral is immortalized in an 1889 painting by Louis Édouard Fournier.)

Hunt's essays on fairies, while gentle literary excursions, may nevertheless be read for their religious and political significance. By the mid-nineteenth century, a debate on the real existence of fairies had gripped England's cultural attention. This was partly owing to the notion (being challenged by Darwinism) that fairies were the re-embodied souls of unbaptized infants and a manifestation of God's magical power. Furthermore, as England shifted toward urbanization, nostalgia for traditional rural life heated up, and fairy lore acquired a patriotic (almost Spenserian) significance in the scheme of the nation's heritage.

Leigh Hunt unapologetically believed that alleged fairy sightings were a product of delirium. And he lived in a place and time when such attitudes could be branded "irreligious" and "radical." But the debate persisted into the twentieth century: when photographs emerged of the alleged Cottingley fairies, their credibility stunned Arthur Conan Doyle. He declared that they "represent either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public, or else they constitute an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character."

Despite his controversial views, one reviewer summed up Leigh Hunt's essays this way: "they are all treated with a similar delicacy of handling--with a touch as light as that of a fairy's pencil."

For this meetup, we will read the following essays (~100p) from A Day by the Fire, and other Papers Hitherto Uncollected:

• Fairies
• The Nymphs of Antiquity and of the Poets
• The Sirens and Mermaids of the Poets
• Tritons and Men of the Sea
• On Giants, Ogres, and Cyclops

A Day by the Fire:

• Google books

Supplemental:

• The Coming of the Fairies (1922): Arthur Conan Doyle's defense of the existence of fairies
• Mystery of the Cottingley Fairies
• Doings of Doyle, podcast
• Leigh Hunt's Hair Book

Trivia:

• Charles Lamb wrote a poem called "The Triumph of the Whale," satirizing the Prince Regent (later King George IV). The poem was published in The Examiner on March 15, 1812, aggravating the political authorities and culminating in Hunt's imprisonment. The poem is quoted in the "Extracts" of Moby-Dick.

Extracts:

• "what Door / Is that, sculptured in elfin freak? / The portal of the Prince o’ the Air? / Thence will the god emerge, and speak?" (Clarel, 2.30)
• "Divine imaginings, like gods, come down to the groves of our Thessalies, and there, in the embrace of wild, dryad reminiscences, beget the beings that astonish the world." (Redburn, 50)

This meetup is part in a series on Muses and Monsters.