Leigh Hunt’s Aesthetics of Suburban Nature: Focusing on Hunt’s Prison Garden

This essay re-examines the significance of the aesthetics of Hunt’s suburbanism by focusing on his suburban gardening in a London jail in terms of the urban middle classes’ suburban culture during the Romantic period. Although Hunt’s suburbanism was seen as an ideological and cultural encroachment in a political aspect, this essay argues that the cultivation of Hunt’s suburban gardening embodies the notion of well-being with cheerfulness that reflects the cultural values of the rapidly growing urban middle classes as one of the aesthetic cultural pheonmena of the early nineteenth century. To acknowledge the significance of Hunt’s suburbanism, this essay first examines how Hunt practically performed his domesticated suburban gardening with his prison garden in a London jail along with an examination of “Songs and Chorus of the Flowers” and “Song of the Flowers.” It then turns to how Hunt cultivated his poetics of suburbia by analyzing Francesca’s bower of bliss in The Story of Rimini. Although Hunt was generally located at the edge of the aesthetic cultural context of the Romantic period, this essay suggests that he was at the center of the flourishing of a new kind of middle class aesthetic culture as a proponent of suburban living.