A BICENTENARY CELEBRATION OF THE LIBERAL

A bicentenary celebration of The Liberal in collaboration with The Byron Society. The Liberal was a short-lived and ill-fated journal, edited by Leigh Hunt in Pisa and published by his brother John in London.

  • Date:

    16 SEPTEMBER
    -
    17 SEPTEMBER 2022
     from 16:00 to 18:00

  • Event location: Bloomsbury Campus, University College London

  • Type: Convention

The Hazlitt and Byron Societies are collaborating on a bicentenary celebration of The Liberal in London on Friday 16 September and Saturday 17 September 2022.

Full details will be posted on the websites of the Byron Society and the Hazlitt Society. Any queries can be sent to drdavidwoodhouse@hotmail.com

The Liberal was a short-lived and ill-fated journal, edited by Leigh Hunt in Pisa and published by his brother John in London. Shelley’s death, Moore’s abstention and Byron’s eventual disinterest doomed the project to just four numbers published between 1822 and 1823. However, The Liberal still represents a collaboration almost unprecedented in English Literature between five canonical writers: Byron, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley. It provided the first home to two small masterpieces: Byron’s The Vision of Judgment and Hazlitt’s My First Acquaintance with Poets. Although Shelley’s Defence of Poetry was not published in the journal as originally intended, his translations of Goethe were printed in it, along with important essays by Mary Shelley. Hazlitt wrote three other essays for The Liberal, Byron two dramatic works and Hunt contributed various pieces of prose and poetry.

FRIDAY 16 SEPTEMBER
4pm
Free guided walk from the site of John Hunt’s office in Old Bond Street, where The Liberal and Liber Amoris were published, to the Art Workers Guild on Queens Square, taking in various landmarks relating to Byron, Hazlitt, Hunt, Shelley and their circles.

6.30pm for 7
At the Art Workers Guild, Maria Schoina of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki will give a lecture: “The great mover of an intellectual revolution”: Byron and The Liberal.

8.45pm
Bicentenary Liberal dinner (venue to follow)

SATURDAY 17 SEPTEMBER
The traditional ‘Hazlitt Day’ at University College London will focus on The Liberal, aiming to give a flavour of all the contributors, an assessment of Hazlitt’s contributions and an inquiry into the meanings of liberalism which evolved in the 1820s and which still resonate today.