Place Name
Much redeveloped. Today Leigh Hunt Street is a pathway through the Mint Street Park. James Henry Leigh Hunt (October 19, 1784 – August 28, 1859), known as simply Leigh Hunt, was a leading man of letters and a radical “in days when Liberal opinions were dangerous”. He was probably best known for being jailed for libelling the then Prince Regent (later George IV) in the newspaper his brother had founded, The Examiner. He was born in Southgate, the son of a clergyman of the Church of England and took to writing poetry, finding minor success. But it was as The Examiner’s editor that he gained both fame and notoriety. The paper’s campaign against flogging in the army and other liberal causes made it very popular, and he won admiration and friendship from the poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Less impressed was William Blake who described the office of The Examiner as containing a “nest of villains” for its criticism of him. Indeed, it would attack any worthy target “from a principle of taste”. But despite early victories in the courts, Leigh Hunt and his brothers were fined and given prison sentences when The Examiner launched an attack on the Prince Regent, describing his physique as “corpulent”. He served two years at Surrey County Gaol, close to the nearby Newington Causeway, in Southwark. Despite his friendships with the greatest poets of the age he never became a literary giant in his own right, his best known work was Story of Rimini. In later life he suffered the indignity of being lampooned by the Dickens character Harold Skimpole in Bleak House.
