SOURCE: "Correcting the Irritability of His Temper: The Evolution of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography," in Romantic Revisions, edited by Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 268-90.

In the following essay, Webb contends that Hunt used his Autobiography as an opportunity to revise earlier, more openly critical writings in order to express a generous, accepting philosophy.

Leigh Hunt was in the first place a circuitous autobiographer. This may have been a result, in part at least, of the rather unfortunate and compromised circumstances in which he was propelled towards his first extended contribution to the emerging genre. After the deaths of Shelley and of Byron, Hunt found himself trapped in Italy, a country which he found essentially uncongenial and harshly out of keeping with the pleasant images conjured up by Italian prints and the Parnaso Italiano. The publisher Henry Colburn rescued Hunt from impecunious and irritable exile...