Home Page1

Reference URL

Add tags

Comment

Rate

To link to the entire object, paste this link in email, IM or document

To embed the entire object, paste this HTML in website

To link to this page, paste this link in email, IM or document

To embed this page, paste this HTML in website

Leigh Hunt letter to Percy Florence Shelley, July 9, 1844

Page1

1 of 4

View Description

View Image & Text

Download

small (250x250 max)

medium (500x500 max)

large ( > 500x500)

Full Resolution

This page

All

Subset

Image
Text

Text Search...

Loading content ...

you wish to report:

Your comment:

Your Name:

Submit

Cancel

...

Rating
Title	Leigh Hunt letter to Percy Florence Shelley, July 9, 1844
Creator	Hunt, Leigh, 1784-1859
Date Original	1844-07-09
Description	Concerning his desire to borrow £200; Mary Shelley's letter of April 20 assuring him that his pressing debts would be taken care of if possible; his debt of £400, including £200 borrowed from the Duke of Devonshire; his creditors' belief that good fortune came to him on the death of Sir Timothy Shelley; his ill health.
Note	In Vincent Hunt's autograph.
Personal Name Subject	Hunt, Leigh, 1784-1859 Shelley, Percy Florence, Sir, 1819-1889 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851 Shelley, Timothy, Sir, 1753-1844 Devonshire, William Spencer Cavendish, Duke of, 1790-1858
Geographic Subject	England -- London -- Kensington and Chelsea -- Kensington
Chronological Subject	1840-1850
Type (DCMIType)	Text
Type (AAT)	Correspondence
Type (IMT)	jpeg
Digital Collection	Leigh Hunt Letters
Contributing Institution	University of Iowa. Libraries. Special Collections Dept.
Archival Collection	Brewer-Leigh Hunt Collection
Collection Guide	http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/resources/Brewer-LeighHunt.html
Location	MsL H94sh
Rights Management	Educational use only, no other permissions given. This letter is owned by The University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department, and is provided here for educational purposes. It may not be reproduced or distributed in any format without written permission of the Special Collections Department.
Contact Information	Contact The University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department: lib-spec@uiowa.edu
Height (cm)	22.5
Width (cm)	18.1
Number of Pages	4
Number of Sheets of Paper	1
Digitization Specifications	Scanned with Ricoh Aficio 2335 scanner at 600 ppi, 24-bit color. Archival tiff image available.
Date Digital	2008-04-10
Transcript	Kensington July 9th 1844. My dear Percy/ Do suppose for a moment that we are miserable to what you have done for us, or Should not be ever thankful for it. It is the morsel of our existence. But so perverse is fate sometimes, that our good fortune has exasperated our creditors. I feel sure that you will acquit me of writing this letter with any willingness; and I trust also, that you give me credit for being fully sensible of the delicacy of my positions with regard to my kind friends at Putney, especially after what they are already doing for me; but terrible pressure forces me to speak, and I now speak to yourself rather /that/ than to your mother, partly because you are the person who would at my rate have to be spoken to at last, and partly that the responsibility of troubling you may be upon myself rather than her. I have great sighs in setting out on this task; and you must forgive it for the real pangs they contain, and for my dislike of causing a moment's shadow /---/ of discomfort to either of you. Imagine that it is not myself, or my Shabbiness of my own that is talking to you, but a dozen people who take advantage of circumstances, and force me to cry out. In the letter which your mother wrote to me on the 20th April,and which she was good enough to say you had seen and approved, She expresses her assurance that if any present debt Should press, and there was any command of money, care would be taken to free me from it. It was in consequence of this intimation, and of the other passage in which she speakes of the identity of your own kind wishes with her's to feel that I was "no longer so burdened by care and necessity" that I gave her the list of all my little debts, amount-ing (with the inclusion of that to the Duke of Devonshire) to the /never/ severer sum total of four hundred pounds. The Duke's except as matter of information, and completing the list, I should not have mentioned, had not the two hundred pounds he was kind enough to lend me been borrowed upon the strength of its being returned him, either in two years, or upon my expected receipt of the two thousand pounds at Sir Timothy's death. This rendered it necessary though I should explained to him why I could not return it on that occasion; and your mother was good enough to give me permission to do so; which I did, and received an answer full of his usual good nature. But my other [page break] creditors alas! whatever may be the amount of the good nature of some of them, have not estates or tempers commensurate; and as I had kept the larger of these in hope with this two thousand pounds, and all of them had heard accounts of some kind of good fortune that had happened to me by Sir Timothy, either from one another or the newspapers, the consequence at length is that all have become pressing, and some furious. I have paid off one or two from the list, and perhaps had I spoken to more friends of mine at once, when I first received your mother's letter, they would have come in aid of your kind intention, and some how or other contrived to raise, to get advanced for me, the sum necessary to set me clear, and realize the good wishes of you all; yet this might but in the end have hampered me with obligations to clear off to booksellers or others, at however distant a period, or thing always frightful to a man in ill health: so that I should not have been clear after all; and I was naturally anxious to keep all my remaining obligations in this world in as narrow and affectionately- regarded a Sphere as possible; and no two or three months have /---/ slipped on; and I now feel my dear Percy, compelled to ask, not so much whether the lawyers and legacy-men have yet given you any command of money, as whether, without blushing, and upon the strength of any good I may have been the medium of doing the /---/ estate by that document of Lord Byron's, or rather upon the strength of your own handsome wishes to see me set free, you could oblige me by joining me in a bill for the sum of two hundred pounds, or whatever sum you might feel warranted and able to calculate upon towards that end I feel certain that I could get it discounted at a moderate interest at all events, [counting] me kindly, my dear boy (for Baronet and stout fellow as you are, you will always be a boy to your fathers old friends); and dont imagine that I meant to plague you in fortune with letters like this, whatever be its result Judge of the future by the past, in that respect. It will not deceive you. Another excuse must be our ill health here. I am loth to Speak of it, and none of us certainly are in the habit of making faces about it, or [?] the show of our trials in front of our better spirits. But retaining, as I do, thank God, my power to write, and prepared to keep myself clear with them should I [?reason] so (and I have plenty of irons by the fire to that end) I cannot conceal /---/ from myself, and perhaps ought not to conceal from a friend on such an occasion, that the inability to get beyond the demands upon us, worries, and shakes us, and deprives us of our moral faculties more than it used to do, when younger. You may judge of our pressures, and how I have hated to speak of them, when I tell you of our debts on the list or bill of L12 comes due to-day; another on Mon-day next to the same amount - with taxes the week after, and the other demands calling out, and every shilling forced out of our pockets by taxes yesterday. I had hoped to get a little more time [continued on top of first page] with an advance from a bookseller last Saturday, but was disappointed. Ever my dear Percy, your obliged and faithful friend, Leigh Hunt
Transcript By	Lee, Rachel
Transcript Location	University of Iowa. Libraries. Special Collections Dept.

Title	Page1
Relation - Is Part Of	Leigh Hunt letter to Percy Florence Shelley, July 9, 1844
Digital Collection	Leigh Hunt Letters
File Name	h94sh_Page1.jpg
Transcript	Kensington July 9th 1844. My dear Percy/ Do suppose for a moment that we are miserable to what you have done for us, or Should not be ever thankful for it. It is the morsel of our existence. But so perverse is fate sometimes, that our good fortune has exasperated our creditors. I feel sure that you will acquit me of writing this letter with any willingness; and I trust also, that you give me credit for being fully sensible of the delicacy of my positions with regard to my kind friends at Putney, especially after what they are already doing for me; but terrible pressure forces me to speak, and I now speak to yourself rather /that/ than to your mother, partly because you are the person who would at my rate have to be spoken to at last, and partly that the responsibility of troubling you may be upon myself rather than her. I have great sighs in setting out on this task; and you must forgive it for the real pangs they contain, and for my dislike of causing a moment's shadow /---/ of discomfort to either of you. Imagine that it is not myself, or my Shabbiness [continued from page 4] with an advance from a bookseller last Saturday, but was disappointed. Ever my dear Percy, your obliged and faithful friend, Leigh Hunt

Find results with:

Searching collections:

Home Page1

Leigh Hunt letter to Percy Florence Shelley, July 9, 1844

Object Description

Description

Tags

Comments

Leigh Hunt letter to Percy Florence Shelley, July 9, 1844

Leigh Hunt letter to Percy Florence Shelley, July 9, 1844

	All
	Pages Enter page numbers or page ranges separated by commas. For example: 1,3,5-12