Re-Visioning Rimini: Dante in the Cockney School

It has always been easy to laugh at Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, a rather unusual item in the history of prison writing. Even a modern critic such as Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, writing one of the few full critical studies of Hunt, speaks of the poem’s “structural and linguistic flaws” (52). Romantic era defenders of traditional culture met Rimini’s publication with a rousing chorus of jeers. The Quarterly Review assailed Hunt’s “vanity, vulgarity, ignorance, and coarseness” (14 [January 1816]:481); Blackwood’s Magazine called Rimini “indecent and immoral,” and attacked not only its subject but its style:

Leigh Hunt’s chivalrous rhymes are as unlike those of Walter Scott, as is the chivalry of a knighted cheesemonger to that of Archibald the Grim, or, if he would rather have it so, of Sir Philip Sydney. He draws his ideas of courtly splendour from the Lord Mayor’s coach, and he dreams of tournaments, after having seen the aldermen on horseback, with their furred gowns and silk stockings. We are indeed altogether incapable of understanding many parts of the description, for a good glossary of the Cockney dialect is yet a desideratum in English literature…. What, for instance, may be the English of swaling? (2 [October 1817]:198).