Editorial Collaborations in The Liberal
(Arianna Antonielli, University of Florence)
When The Liberal appeared between 1822 and 1823, it immediately distinguished itself from other Romantic periodicals by virtue of its geographical origins and its unusual editorial structure. Rather than emerging from a London publishing house or a single authorial agenda, it was conceived in the expatriate circles of Pisa and Genoa and shaped by a constellation of writers whose daily interactions made collaboration not an abstract ideal but a lived practice. Leigh Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron envisaged the periodical as a collective experiment, a space where literary invention, political debate, translation, and cultural exchange could co-exist. Recent scholarship, most notably the digital humanities initiative Reviving The Liberal, has reframed the periodical as a crucial document for understanding early “nineteenth-century Anglo-Italian and European liberal culture” (The Liberal Project), revealing the depth of its collaborative energy. At the same time, The Liberal must be placed within the broader “war of the intellectuals”, which characterised the early nineteenth-century press (Butler 1983: 138; Morrison 2024: 356-372). Liberal and reformist periodicals such as Hunt’s Examiner (1808-1886) had long been locked in polemical struggle with conservative organs like the Quarterly Review (1809-1967) and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817-1980), which attacked liberal politics generally and, more specifically, literary coteries such as the “Cockney School” of poetry (doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/95479). In this polarised environment, the idea of a new liberal miscellany carried a programmatic charge: it was both a continuation of an existing tradition of radical journalism and a conscious attempt to displace the centre of that debate from London to the Mediterranean “South”. The collaborative project of The Liberal thus emerged as the latest and, in some respects, most experimental stage in a decade-long battle over who had the authority to interpret literature, politics, and public morality.
As early as 1821, Shelley wrote to Hunt proposing the creation of a joint periodical. This proposal was more than a burst of literary enthusiasm: it responded to a shared need for a platform where their political and aesthetic values could find expression beyond the increasingly conservative British press. Imagining such a project from England might have been implausible; imagining it from Italy was natural. As Lilla Maria Crisafulli has noted, “Italy appeared to the early-nineteenth-century British, and in particular after 1815, as a ‘counter-space’, whose extraordinary historical and artistic past clashed with the decline of the present time” (in Crisafulli, Baiesi, Farese 2023: 16). The group of young Romantic intellectuals who had chosen Italy as their home exploited such oppositional complexity. Pisa, for instance, was a space of communion for the Shelley circle: an intellectual environment enriched by political refugees, cosmopolitan thinkers, scientists, translators, and artists. Genoa, where some later stages of the periodical were prepared, provided an equally rich atmosphere. In this sense, the Italian setting was not incidental, in that it actively grounded the collaborative character of the venture. Within this setting, the so-called Pisan Circle functioned as the true microcosm out of which The Liberal grew. It was not a fixed, exclusive coterie, but a shifting community that gradually expanded to include exiled patriots, scholars, performing artists and minor poets alongside the better-known figures of Byron, Shelley and Hunt. What held this heterogeneous group together was a shared liberal-radical sensibility, encompassing sympathy with revolutionary movements, impatience with clerical and monarchical authority, moral and sexual non-conformism, and the conviction that literature itself could operate as a vehicle for social critique. Equally imperative was a collaborative approach to what Hunt defined as “our new work”: “I shall get over for our new work, especially since Lord B. enters into it with great ardour. […], and Shelley has some excellent MS. ready also” (Hunt 1862: 189).
Although Hunt acted as the coordinating editor, The Liberal resisted the centralized editorial model typical of metropolitan magazines. In most London periodicals of the early nineteenth century, editorship was hierarchical, as the editor controlled the content, commissioned articles, and oversaw production. Hunt, by contrast, worked collaboratively, relying on a spirit of shared responsibility. No contributor could be fully isolated from the others: Byron’s prose pieces and poems influenced the tone of the whole; Shelley’s translations and visionary political writing shaped the intellectual horizon; and Hunt’s essays structured the quarterly’s rhythm and thematic direction. The result was a decentralised editorial ecosystem in which intellectual authority circulated among the contributors instead of flowing downward from a single editor. This non-hierarchical model also informed the internal architecture of each issue. The opening contributions, often substantial works by Byron, set a high-profile, provocative tone; essays by Hunt and Hazlitt placed this tone within a broader political and moral discourse; shorter poems, translations and reviews wove a finer texture of cross-references and allusions. Even relatively moderate pieces, such as the interventions of the “Old Gentleman” (TL, “Preface”, x), a persona that voices cautious, club-room notion of liberality, were strategically positioned to widen the periodical’s appeal and to stage an internal negotiation between radical critique and a more measured liberal stance. Editorial collaboration thus extended beyond the act of co-authoring or revising texts to the very choreography of how those texts were arranged and made to interact on the written page. Crucially, collaboration in The Liberal unfolded on several interwoven levels. On the textual level, the periodical offered a strikingly heterogeneous mixture of genres – lyric and satirical poetry, political essays, literary criticism, historical sketches, translations, and narrative fragments. Such generic diversity fostered what might be called an “editorial dialogue”, where texts responded to one another, elaborated the same themes in different registers, or provided internal counterpoints. Shelley’s translations from Italian sources opened new cultural perspectives; Byron’s ironies tempered the more idealistic tendencies of Hunt and Shelley; Hunt’s essays provided connective tissue that held the quarterly together. The periodical became an arena in which texts were not isolated units but parts of a serial conversation.
Several examples make this dialogic principle especially clear. At the close of the first issue, Hunt’s “Epigram of Alfieri” (TL 1, 1 [1822], 163-164) – which reproduces Alfieri’s original Paragone d’armonia fra tre lingue moderne (1789) before presenting Hunt’s own “imitation and answer” – appears in contiguous sequence with Byron’s “Epigrams on Lord Castlereagh”, without any separation between them. Hunt’s adaptation of Alfieri transforms a linguistic jeu d’esprit into a pointed reflection on the political meaning of the word “captain” in Italy, France, and England, hinting at the absence of genuine national leaders in Italy and at the ambiguous legacy of Napoleon in France. Byron’s epigrams then pick up the sharply epigrammatic tone established by Hunt, while also redirecting its energy towards contemporary politics. Whereas Hunt stages a dialogic exchange between Alfieri and his own “Imitation and Answer,” Byron turns the same compact and antithetical form against Castlereagh (“Epigrams on Lord Castlereagh”, 164), exploiting the epigram’s capacity for sudden reversal and moral indictment. The proximity of the two sequences in The Liberal intensifies this effect: linguistic wit on the one hand, and, on the other, a brutal political satire that culminates in the repeated image of Castlereagh cutting his throat, both literally and metaphorically, as the emblem of a destructive public career (“Thou cut’st thy throat, that Britain may be sav’d”). A similar dynamic is at work in the pairing of William Hazlitt’s essays with Hunt’s poetry. Hazlitt’s “On the Spirit of Monarchy” (TL 1, 2 [1823], 227-228) strips kingship of its mystique, insisting that “all power is but an unabated nuisance, a barbarous assumption, an aggravated injustice”, while “On the Scotch Character” (TL 1, 2 [1823], 367-368) ridicules national stereotypes and the self-interest of established elites. Read next to Hunt’s long poem “The Dogs” (TL 1, 2 [1823], 246-263), which denounces the Duke of Wellington and the Establishment through the allegory of starving soldiers forced to feed the general’s hounds, these essays and verses reinforce one another. Across different genres, they build a sustained critique of aristocratic privilege, militarism and the callousness of governments towards common soldiers, showing how editorial collaboration could sharpen the quarterly’s political edge.
On the political level, collaboration meant negotiating a shared liberal identity. The three central contributors held different forms of liberalism, from Shelley’s radical idealism through Hunt’s humanitarian reformism up to Byron’s aristocratic but cosmopolitan critique of hypocrisy. These ideological differences did not fracture the collaboration; instead, they enriched it. Their negotiations concerning tone, political risk, and the degree of directness permissible in the hostile environment of British censorship reveal how deeply linked political and editorial labour were. The magazine’s satiric and polemical texts repeatedly return to the theme of “apostasy” – the betrayal of former radical commitments by figures such as Robert Southey – and expose the moral costs of accommodation to power. Publishing a politically provocative text was therefore not merely an artistic decision but a collective responsibility, undertaken by mutual consent and with an acute awareness of the legal and social consequences.
Culturally, the collaborative ethos of The Liberal grew out of its Anglo-Italian environment. Italy was not only a refuge, but also a source of creative and editorial material. The writers engaged with Dante and the Italian Trecento, Boccaccio’s narrative tradition, Alfieri’s political tragedies, and contemporary continental liberalism. Translation played a central role both as a literary exercise and as a means of cross-cultural mediation. Hunt’s version of the “Suliotes” (TL 1, 2, 385-394), based on an Italian manuscript by Christoforos Perraivos (1773-1863), offers English readers a direct testimony of the Greek struggle for independence; and his “Virgil’s Hostess” (TL 1, 2, 377-384) reanimates a classical text while foregrounding the warmth and conviviality of Mediterranean life. Essays such as Thomas Jefferson Hogg’s “Longus” (TL 1, 2, 347-366) or Charles Armitage Brown’s “Les Charmettes and Rousseau” (TL 1, 2, 327-345) contribute to what Marilyn Butler famously described as a “cult of the South” (1983): a revaluation of southern, and especially Mediterranean, culture against northern austerity and Protestant suspicion of sensuality. The presence of these Italian and classical materials in The Liberal created a cosmopolitan frame that distinguished the magazine from British periodicals of the same decade, which were typically insular in orientation. This transnational dimension supports the claim, advanced by the Reviving the Liberal Project, that the periodical must be read through the lens of transnational intellectual circulation.
Despite its intellectual richness, the collaborative structure also made the magazine vulnerable. The practical challenges of producing a London publication from Italy were severe: delays in correspondence, difficulties in securing printers, the absence of reliable distribution channels, and financial instability. The first volume of The Liberal (comprising issues one and two) was printed in a run of 6,000 copies, but fewer than half were sold, resulting in a substantial financial loss and signalling the fragility of the enterprise from the outset. The radical content of the miscellany attracted the hostility of Tory reviewers and the suspicion of booksellers, while its cosmopolitan stance sat uneasily with a public accustomed to more narrowly national perspectives. These external pressures exacerbated internal tensions. The emotional and personal bonds on which the project depended were themselves precarious. Tensions between Byron and Hunt were real and sometimes acute, as the two authors had different expectations, social backgrounds, and temperaments, and their uneasy cohabitation in Pisa and later in Genoa placed long-standing divergences under strain. Shelley’s death in July 1822 profoundly affected the group, and without his stabilising influence the collaborative dynamic lost much of its coherence: “his fundamental role as a mediator between ‘the wren and the eagle’ – as he had termed the Byron-Hunt friendship from the time that they had first met during Hunt’s imprisonment – came to an abrupt end” (Baiesi in Crisafulli, Baiesi, Farese 2023: 101-102). The result was that The Liberal survived for only four issues. Yet, although its lifespan might appear disappointing, it remains a fascinating case study in Romantic collaboration, demonstrating how collective literary ventures can give shape to political ideals, cultural bridges, and creative experiments that transcend the capacities of individual authors. The Liberal shows that collaboration can be both fruitful and fragile, generative and ephemeral. Above all, the periodical illustrates how literature can function as a space of shared labour, a negotiation among different voices, experiences, and cultural traditions, aimed to articulate a broader vision of artistic and political possibility. Even in its brevity, The Liberal endures as a testament to the creative potential of collaborative editorial practices and offers valuable insights into the dynamics of transnational intellectual cooperation: “A brilliant meteor, clustered with bright thoughts of three great men, was to have flashed across the literary firmament” (Pickering 1966, 25).
References
The Liberal Project. Università di Firenze. https://theliberal.unifi.it/.
Blunden, Edmund, Leigh Hunt: A Biography, London, Cobden-Sanderson, 1930.
Butler, Marilyn, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983.
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.
Pickering L. P., Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and The Liberal, New York, Haskell House, 1966.
St. Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Stock, Paul, The Shelley–Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Ultimo aggiornamento
15.01.2026