Thornton Hunt

Thornton Hunt edited a serious newspaper, believed in free love as a principle, and had four children by his co-editor's wife. He was the eldest son of Leigh Hunt, the poet and radical who had gone to prison for libelling the Prince Regent, and grew up in a household where Keats and Shelley came to dinner and there was never any money. He trained as a painter, gave it up for journalism, and became one of the most capable editors of the mid-century - founder with George Henry Lewes of The Leader in 1850, and later the first editor of the Daily Telegraph, which he shaped into the model of the cheap serious newspaper. He held, and practised, the view that marriage should not confine affection. Lewes had married Agnes Jervis in an open arrangement, and when she began having children by Hunt, Lewes registered the first of them as his own - which in English law was condonation of the adultery and made divorce impossible for the rest of his life. That is the reason Lewes and George Eliot could never marry, and lived together for twenty-four years while she was cut by her own family. He had ten children by his wife Katharine and four by Agnes, and supported both households on journalism. Contemporaries who disapproved of the theory conceded that he abandoned nobody, which was more than several of his critics could say. The Telegraph under him was the first English paper to sell at a penny and reach a mass readership, and by the 1870s had the largest circulation in the world. He is remembered, when he is remembered, entirely for the private arrangement rather than the newspaper.

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