Key Editorial Features of The Liberal
(Arianna Antonielli, University of Florence)
Conceived in Pisa by Leigh Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, and printed in London by John Hunt in 1822-1823, The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South was a short-lived periodical of only four issues, yet remarkably dense in programmatic intentions. The journal arose from the specific conditions of the Pisan circle – an Anglo-Italian community of writers who, far from Britain, tried to rethink the relationship between literature, politics, and space at a European scale. To Shelley, Byron, and Hunt, publishing in English and printing in England a journal entirely conceived in Italy meant challenging British post-Napoleonic ideology, while also announcing a transnational approach to literature that strategically overturned notions of nationhood, patriotism, and Britishness arising from the prolonged conflict with France.
This Pisan context, enriched by interactions with local intellectuals like Francesco Pacchiani – nicknamed “il diavolo Pacchiani” – Giovanni Rosini, and Andrea Vaccà in salons hosted by Sophie Caudeiron and Elena Mastiani, immersed the circle in Italy’s pre-Risorgimento ferment, where shared myths of kinship, sanctity, and honour fuelled an imagined national community or “madre-patria” amid political fragmentation (Crisafulli in Crisafulli, Baiesi, Farese 2023, 16-19).
This ambitious vision manifests itself first in Leigh Hunt’s “Preface” to the initial issue, where the editors declare that they “wish the title of [their] work to be taken in its largest acceptation, old as well as new” (The Liberal 1: viii), positioning themselves as “advocates of every species of liberal knowledge” (ix). Franca Dellarosa (in Crisafulli, Baiesi, Farese 2023, 36-50) illuminates how this hinges on the semantic transition of “liberal” from an older moral sense to a specifically political one, as Hunt aligns the periodical with those “bodies of men who are called LIBERALS” (ix) in contemporary British politics. In other words, the “Preface” transforms a seemingly abstract title into an explicit political posture, and, as Daisy Hay argues, it is precisely this overlap between intellectual and political liberalism that defines the periodical’s distinctive ideological profile, challenging post-Napoleonic binaries in a manner Hay terms a “reassessment” of Romantic liberalism (2008, 307-320). Closely related to this redefinition is Hunt’s staged attack on complacent conservative appropriations of the term: the mocking “old club-house Gentleman” interrupts to claim, “I am a Liberal myself, if you come to that, and a devilish liberal I am” (ix), embodying a shallow, aristocratic liberalism confined to clubs and drawing rooms. By exposing its logical, ethical, and political flaws, Hunt re-attaches “liberal” to values like openness, reform, and social equality, which the journal insists have been emptied or distorted by conservative discourse. Consequently, the attacks on dogmatic religion, notions of legitimacy, and institutional hypocrisy threading through its essays and poems emerge as direct outgrowths of this editorial stance on what liberal should signify in the early 1820s.
Building on this ideological foundation, a second crucial feature is the magazine’s consciously transnational Anglo-Italian positioning, evident from the subtitle “Verse and Prose from the South,” which frames a southern perspective addressing British readers. Serena Baiesi and Carlotta Farese describe The Liberal as a space where Anglo-Italian relations are imprinted in the very structure of the periodical, rather than treated as a marginal topic, with Italy functioning not as picturesque backdrop but as a matrix for editorial choices (in Crisafulli, Baiesi, Farese 2023, 7-13). This is particularly clear in Hunt’s series Letters from Abroad (TL vol. 1, issue 1; vol. 1, issue 2; vol. 2, issue 3; vol. 2, issue 4) distributed across the four issues (totalling 80 pages), which, as Timothy Webb explores (ibid., 115), blend travel writing, diaristic material, and political commentary into a hybrid form akin to a selective guidebook for Protestant English travellers in 1820s Northern Italy. For instance, “Letter I – Pisa” famously evokes the city as “a small white city, with a tower also white, leaning very distinctly in the distance at one end of it, trees on either side, and blue mountains for the back-ground,” yet also casts it as a liberal space, home to a university whose lectures welcome men “of any sect or religion,” invoking Galileo Galilei as the figure who gave “another great impulse […] to the progress of philosophy and Liberal Opinion”. Through such manoeuvres, the periodical harnesses Italian locations to discuss British issues at a critical distance, transforming the geography of the text into an editorial device for articulating a broader European liberal imaginary deeply informed by Pisan salons and the circle’s exchanges with figures like Pacchiani, whose republican zeal mirrored the journal’s spirit.
Complementing this transnational ethos, a third editorial hallmark is the quarterly’s rich mix of genres – poetry, political essays, tales, reviews, travel letters, and translations appearing side by side – which continues patterns from Hunt’s earlier periodicals but radicalizes them through foregrounding Italian material and elevating translation to a vehicle for cultural politics, as Maria Schoina demonstrates in her analysis of Byron’s translation of Luigi Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore (in Crisafulli, Baiesi, Farese 2023, 161) and her wider-ranging research on “Romantic Anglo-Italians” (2009). The fourth issue exemplifies this through Byron’s translation of the “First Canto,” immediately followed by the Italian original – an arrangement praising the beauty of the Italian language, as in Childe Harold s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) –, inviting readers to compare texts and inhabit what Lisa Vargo terms a “cosmopolitan citizenry” (2010, 132) of judgment across languages and traditions. Far from supplemental, translation here serves as a paradigm: it enacts the journal’s border-crossing project, decentring nationalized cultural capital, and reconfiguring the relationship of English literature to its Italian sources. These processes are in keeping with Crisafulli’s emphasis on translations of Luigi Pulci and Vittorio Alfieri as gestures towards Italy’s pre-Risorgimento literary tradition (in Crisafulli, Baiesi, Farese 2023, 21). Equally integral to the editorial profile is the collaborative voice indicated by the first-person plural “we” consistently employed throughout the “Preface” and embodying the triumvirate of Hunt, Byron, and Shelley, and more broadly the Pisan circle spanning Pisa and Lerici. The project was a genuinely collaborative enterprise, distinct from Hunt’s solo ventures such as The Examiner and The Indicator.
These content-driven features also intersect with the periodical’s material form and publishing practices, which help to situate The Liberal within the early-nineteenth-century marketplace. Although conceived as a periodical issued in four numbers between October 1822 and July 1823, its material circulation did not consistently follow a pamphlet-based serial model. While the first number appeared on its own, the second was issued in January 1823 within a volume that also contained a revised second edition of the inaugural number, inaugurating a pattern in which textual “numbers” were gathered into octavo volumes (c. 21 cm) at the point of publication. This shift also registers in the economics of production: as Marshall notes, The Liberal’s first volume (nos. 1-2) was printed in a reduced run of 6,000 copies, of which only 2,700 were sold, producing an estimated loss of around forty-one pounds and revealing the earliest signs of financial strain within the venture (Marshall 1960, 162). Produced and distributed by the radical publisher John Hunt from 22 Old Bond Street, London, rather than through the major commercial houses, The Liberal was nonetheless registered in the periodical press as its constituent numbers appeared: The Gentleman’s Magazine, for instance, lists “The Liberal. No. II. 8vo. pp. 134. Hunt” (February 1823, 158), while The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review records “The Liberal, No. IV” (2 August 1823, 481). A surviving copy in Sir John Soane’s Museum (Catalogue no. B6994), preserved in a nineteenth-century half-calf binding by Edwin Hutchinson dated 28 February 1832, further documents the material afterlife of these volumes and their continued reconfiguration over time. The typography and layout reinforce a hybrid magazine-book status: the title page’s widely spaced small capitals – “THE LIBERAL. VERSE AND PROSE FROM THE SOUTH. VOLUME THE SECOND” – eschew elaborate ornament for size and spacing variations. Interior pages feature single-column roman type, generous margins, discreet small-caps headings, and italics for emphasis, without illustrations or vignettes, contrasting Blackwood’s dense double columns or the New Monthly Magazine’s ornamentation. Through its sober and non-hierarchical layout, The Liberal equates prose, verse, and essays, encouraging sustained, linear reading rather than fragmentary or hierarchized modes of engagement. Paper and production values similarly point to a decent but non-luxurious object (wove stock with foxing; no coloured plates or special fonts), consistent with Hunt’s inability to match the expense or scale of Tory quarterlies (Marshall 1960, 212-13).
The history of the journal’s reception further clarifies how these formal and editorial choices were read within the contemporary literary marketplace. As Dellarosa notes (in Crisafulli et al. 2023, 35), Tory periodicals such as Blackwood’s framed The Liberal through the polemical shorthand of the “Cockney imprint,” casting it as a manifestation of metropolitan vulgarity inseparable from Hunt’s radical reputation. This strategy is evident in Blackwood’s 1822 attack on Hunt’s “The Florentine Lovers” (translated from Marco Lastri’s L’osservatore fiorentino), dismissed as an “unauthorized” Cockney intrusion into a literary domain imagined as properly Italian, aristocratic, and closed to such mediations. Yet, read retrospectively through Baiesi’s concluding assessment, this hostile reception appears less as a form of discrediting than as an index of consistency. What Blackwood’s sought to denounce instead confirms Hunt’s sustained commitment to literature as a vehicle of social reform across national boundaries, one deliberately “infused with English liberalism and Italian culture” and oriented towards the circulation of Romantic ideals of reform and equality (Baiesi in Crisafulli, Baiesi, Farese 2023, 111). The Liberal’s editorial identity is therefore not incidental. The absence of ornament, the clear single-column layout, the octavo book-like format, and the decision to print without illustrations, all align with the editorial programme sketched in the “Preface.” The Liberal presents itself as a sober, text-driven miscellany in which graphic restraint emphasises argument and voice rather than spectacle. At the same time, its modest scale and fragile economics anticipate its short life, situating the journal as a brief and precarious presence within the Romantic periodical milieu.
References
The Liberal Project. Università di Firenze. https://theliberal.unifi.it/.
Crisafulli, Lilla, Baiesi Serena, Farese Carlotta (a cura di), Imprinting Anglo-Italian Relations in The Liberal, Lausanne, Peter Lang, 2023.
Hay, Daisy, “Liberals, Liberales and The Liberal: a Reassessment”, European Romantic Review, 19 (2008), 307-320.
Marshall, William H., Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and “The Liberal”, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960.
Morrison Robert, “Nineteenth-Century Reviews Reviewed”, in The Cambridge History of the British Essay, ed. by Denise Gigante and Jason Childs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024, 356-372.
Schoina Maria, Romantic Anglo-Italians: Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle, Farnham, Ashgate, 2009.
Vargo Lisa, “Writing for The Liberal”, in Mary Shelley: Her Circle and Her Contemporaries, ed. L. Adam Mekler and Lucy Morrison, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars 2010.
Ultimo aggiornamento
15.01.2026