LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 43rounded figure, “and helped to make him singularly unlike the great origi-
nal” (6.623). (Hunt was tall, slender and striking, as the name Skimpole might
suggest). He also asked Forster to oversee changes that would make the char-
acter “much less like... I have no right to give Hunt pain, and I am so bent
on not doing it that I wish you would look at all the proof once more, and
indicate any particular place in which you feel it particularly like. Where-
upon I will alter that place” (6.628). Although Forster did so, the essentials
remained; Dickens’s unconscious was bent more powerfully than his will on
the need to pillory Leigh Hunt. Why?
The answer lies in the course of Dickens’s relationship with Hunt, which
echoed the relation with his father. Dickens met Hunt through John Forster
in 1838, when he was twenty-six and Hunt fifty-four—probably just a year
or two older than John Dickens. The original attraction was a sentimental
one: Dickens was moved by hearing of a comment Hunt made about the
inscription Dickens had placed on the grave of his beloved sister-in-law
Mary Hogarth, and asked Forster to relay his deep gratitude (1.340–41). For
a few years Dickens seems to have been one among the young literary men
that Hunt collected around him. In at least one surviving letter to Hunt we
see Dickens busily sucking up, waxing eloquent in a lively Hunt manner
about a poem the older man had sent him (2.66–67). In another 1840 note
Dickens feels intimate enough to tease Hunt about “the faintest smack of
wine running through” his oral delivery at a party the previous night (2.99).
In June 1847, when Hunt was ill and in financial need, Dickens proposed a
series of dramatic performances to benefit him, writing that “Leigh Hunt
has done more to instruct the young men of England, and to lend a helping
hand to those who educated themselves, than any writer in England” (5.88).
The emphasis on help to the self-educated suggests that Hunt had briefly
played a role that John Dickens had neglected.
By this time, however, Dickens had already distanced himself from the
Hunt who resembled John Dickens. By 1842 Hunt had asked for and received
a loan, which Dickens begged him to forget. The occasional notes remain
cordial but suggest impatience with Hunt’s inability to do some thing as simple
as make a firm dinner date. Not long after Hunt had received a government
pension in 1847, making the benefit performances unnecessary, he found
himself once again “in difficulties,” and asked Dickens whether he might
revive the performances on his behalf. Dickens refused, though he added a
little box at the top of the letter, enclosing his sense of guilt: “If I could think
of the ‘KINDEST’ WORD in the language, I’d put it here, to begin with” (5.447).
Kindness was one of Hunt’s watchwords. Improvidence was, of course, one
of Dickens’s greatest fears.