The first meeting of this year’s London-Paris Romanticism Seminar will take place on Friday 18 October 2024 at 5.30 pm in Room 243, Senate House, University of London. To launch the new series, we are delighted to welcome as our guest speaker the renowned Romantics scholar Professor Nicholas Roe of the University of St Andrews, who will present a paper entitled The Book that Nobody Reads: Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828). This will be followed by a discussion and wine reception. The event is free and open to everyone, including postgraduates and members of the public. The seminar will be chaired by David Duff.

Nicholas Roe is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of critically acclaimed biographies and studies including John Keats: A New Life, The First Life of Leigh Hunt and The Politics of Nature. His first book, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, was republished in a thirtieth anniversary edition in 2018. His edited books include Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life and John Keats and Romantic Scotland. He is also founder and editor of the journal Romanticism. Forthcoming next year from Oxford University Press will be a new book, The Illustrious Afterlife of John Keats.

Regarding the topic of his talk, Nick writes:

“From John Lockhart to Fiona MacCarthy, Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828) has been disparaged and dismissed – ‘the miserable book of a miserable man’. So routine has this become that one suspects most have not bothered to read what Hunt’s book actually says. Opening with Marilyn Butler’s chapter ‘The Cult of the South: the Shelley circle, its creed and its influence,’ I want to consider how the ‘Marlow moment’ of  Spring 1817,  and its reveries about the Mediterranean, shaped the classicism of Hunt’s Foliage (1818) and, more particularly, the narrative of Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828). I aim to explore Hunt’s book from several perspectives: as a corrective to the idealistic ‘Cult of the South’ and to some ideas about Byron, and as a narrative that has some curiously modernist tendencies. We are all aware of Hunt’s prized independence as editor of the Examiner, so perhaps we should reflect on Hunt’s words: ‘I am not vindictive’, ‘I tell the truth’. What will emerge in the paper, I hope, is a more nuanced view of Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries as a prototype of modern biography, published long before Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians spurned ‘tedious panegyric’ and promoted biography that would shoot ‘a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses.’ As Hunt came to terms with Lord Byron and the actuality of ‘the South,’ the ‘Marlow moment’ can be seen to have helped to shape Hunt’s determination to ‘put an end to a great deal of false biography.’ That this meant Hunt would have to write ‘of necessity a painful retrospect’ is one compelling aspect of a complex and self-critical narrative that tells us of ‘a sense of mistake on both sides’.”