Leigh Hunt

Leigh Hunt went to prison for calling the Prince Regent a fat Adonis of fifty, and ran the most important literary salon in England from his cell. He and his brother John founded the Examiner in 1808 as a radical weekly - against slavery, for Catholic emancipation, against the war - and it was prosecuted repeatedly until a libel on the Regent in 1812 got them both two years. He decorated the cell with trellised wallpaper and a piano, and Byron, Moore, Lamb and Bentham came to visit, which made the imprisonment a far better advertisement than the paper had been. He is the man who found Keats and Shelley. He printed Keats's first published poem, introduced the two of them to each other, and defended both in the Examiner when nobody else would. Blackwood's called the circle the Cockney School and pursued it for years; the attacks on Keats came through him. He went to Italy in 1822 to run a magazine with Byron and Shelley, arrived weeks before Shelley drowned, and stood on the beach at Viareggio when the body was burned. The years afterwards were poor and prolific - essays, a novel, criticism, the poem about Abou Ben Adhem that every Victorian child learned. Dickens put him into Bleak House as Harold Skimpole, the charming parasite, and then spent years denying it. He was never good with money, and his son Thornton was left to support the household by journalism, which he did while also supporting a second one of his own making.

• Lived: 1784 CE – 1859 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: journalist, poet