Working journalists fear the dreaded libel lawsuit, which might be brought against them if they let their negative opinions triumph over neutral, objective reporting. At least, that’s what happened to English critic, essayist, and newspaper editor Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), one of Britain’s most historically ruthless writers. He was chucked into prison for slandering a member of the royal family. But that didn’t stop him from continuing to write. Far from it.
Hunt’s brother John had founded the newspaper The Examiner in 1808, and the two brothers tag-teamed to run it as a radical firing squad against everything in society that they deemed worthy of criticism. Using The Examiner as his platform, Hunt went after everything from theater to international politics. Soon, he was wielding his razor-sharp words against the widely unpopular Prince Regent of the United Kingdom, who would later be known as King George IV. In addition to attacking the prince’s policies, Hunt took aim at his notorious weight gain and his womanizing. This was Hunt’s way of telling the prince that not only was he a despicable hedonist but he also wasn’t worthy to stand as England’s representative on the global stage. At the time, Napoleon was ransacking the world, and in Hunt’s eyes, the prince wasn’t a reliable leader who could stand against the French army.
Historian Philip Harling analyzes Hunt’s relentless campaign against the prince to determine how far the writer was willing to go to make his case that the prince was unfit to rule.
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“If the Prince of Wales failed to straighten himself out, Hunt concluded, the results could be fatal to English liberty at a time when the utmost public virtue was required to defend the realm against Napoleon,” Harling writes, citing Hunt’s own published words. “While the Prince professed to ‘abhor despotism,’ he could hardly be trusted to safeguard the country from it when he was ‘a slave to [his] habits.’”
The offended and outraged prince and his parliament took the Hunt brothers to court for slander and won. From 1813 to 1815, Hunt was incarcerated in the Horsemonger Lane (later renamed Surrey County) Gaol. But he wasn’t deterred by the crown’s agenda to silence all critics. He was given spacious rooms in the prison and was allowed to keep his family with him. The jail rooms were richly decorated, and Hunt ran his quarters simultaneously as a home, a salon for the intellectual elite, and a newsroom. Yes, a newsroom, because, in an act of defiance, he still continued to write and publish The Examiner.
Literary scholar Nikki Hessell describes Hunt’s continuing journalistic enterprise as a form of psychological push back against his imprisonment. As long as Hunt’s writing circulated in print beyond his restricted location, he wasn’t truly imprisoned. And if his readership remained informed on his doings, the prince and his supporters didn’t succeed in silencing him and the rest of the rebellious faction.
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“The Examiner, in other words, was to serve as Hunt’s ticket out of his prison dwelling and into a more congenial home conceived within the pages of the periodical,” Hessell writes. Even so, Hunt’s
certainty that the Examiner could escape “the idea of a prison,” the jailhouse image remained firmly embedded in the paper’s content. It was necessary for Hunt to continue writing about prison, he insisted, “to keep open the communication, that becomes the subjects of a free state.”
In an age where journalists around the world are testing the boundaries in their criticism of political figures, Hunt’s story serves as both a cautionary tale and an inspiration. For the sake of professionalism, it’s vital to restrain oneself to a certain degree. But for the sake of freedom of speech, it’s also imperative that a journalist never stops writing.
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