Coda

Summary

Leigh Hunt – the poet and journalist who had spent a decade promoting Italian literature for radical ends – set sail for Italy on 13 May 1822. His arrival at Pisa should have heralded a fruitful engagement with Byron and Shelley, the other central English expounders of a radical idea of Italy. This coda begins by examining the diary of Hunt’s Mediterranean crossing and first months abroad, to show the diminishment of Hunt’s radicalism when engaged with Italy at first hand. I then discuss the aftermath of Shelley’s death, the disbandment of the Pisan circle, and why its journal, The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South, ran for only four issues. It was this series of events that led Hunt to reflect on his Italian experience a number of years later: ‘we have the best part of Italy in books; and this we can enjoy in England’.¹ During this time, conservative journalists in London attacked the radical promotion of the South with increased venom, and Italian exiles in London were unable to defend their culture from sustained criticism: Foscolo was near-bankrupt and no longer in favour with the major journals, and immigrants such as Bozzi and Panizzi had taken public roles that limited their ability to criticise hegemonic power. In literary culture travel works eclipsed radical writing, and these had little interest in Italy’s political or poetical potential. By the middle of the 1820s writers looking for foreign forms and ideas with which to reform English culture looked more often to Germany than over the Simplon Pass.