Sometimes a caricature succeeds so well that it buries its victim, concealing the baffled complexities of a living being under the exaggerated trappings of the grotesque. Even more cruelly, sometimes the caricature survives its victim to become the accepted image posterity retains.

Such was the unlucky fate of the 19th-century English poet and man of letters Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). He should be remembered as the author of three or four much-anthologized poems and as the friend of several generations of genius – Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, Hazlitt and Lamb, Carlyle, and, later, Tennyson and Browning were among his intimates. But, despite his considerable accomplishments, Hunt’s name is stubbornly associated with the loathsome figure of Harold Skimpole, the monstrously selfish poet and sponger of Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House.”

Dickens began publishing his masterpiece in installments in 1852. When Skimpole, “airy, improvident and objectionable,” first surfaced, Hunt’s many friends recognized him in the caricature. The lampoon contained just enough truth to make it sting. Hunt was hopelessly improvident and his fabled innocence could easily be taken for reckless self-absorption. Its untruth lay in what it left out: Hunt’s courage and generosity and lifelong devotion to principle, often against his own interest, not to mention his talent as a poet.

Hunt’s eccentricities were legendary. Forever in debt, with a bailiff sometimes actually in residence, Hunt and his alcoholic and hypochondriacal wife Mary brought domestic disorder to an almost epic pitch. Thomas Carlyle left an amazed impression: “The Frau Hunt lay drowsing on cushions ‘sick, sick’ with a thousand temporary ailments, the young imps all agog to see me jumped hither and thither, one strange goblin-looking fellow about sixteen, ran ministering about with teakettles for us: it was all a mingled lazaretto and tinkers’ camp, yet with a certain joy and nobleness at the heart of it.” Among Hunt’s manias was a passion for hair, and he amassed a large collection of locks from famous heads – Milton, Samuel Johnson, Napoleon and Josephine were among his trichological trophies – which he sometimes let privileged visitors fondle.

These and other bizarre foibles are on full display in Anthony Holden’s new biography of Hunt, titled “The Wit in the Dungeon: A Life of Leigh Hunt” (to be published in the United States by Little, Brown in December). Given the Skimpolean integument that the shade of Hunt has had to wear, even posthumously, Mr. Holden takes great and justified delight in stripping away layers of misrepresentation, and a new and more engaging figure emerges from his beautifully written account.

Hunt’s spectacular ineptitude in financial matters caused most of his troubles over his long life (he died at the age of 75 in 1859, an increasingly creaky monument of the Romantic age). When he unexpectedly came into a royalty of L1,000 – a huge sum in those days – he seemed not to know even what a check was. When the note was finally exchanged for cash, Hunt stuffed it into an envelope and left it lying on a table where his wife Mary found it and, in a novel burst of tidiness, flung it into the fireplace. Hunt’s publishers took him to the Bank of England in an attempt to have the funds restituted. Hunt was astonished by the bank’s interior and asked one of the clerks, “And this is the Bank of England? And do you sit here all day and never see the green woods and the trees and the flowers and the country? Are you contented with such a life?”

It’s easy to imagine how such ingenuousness must have grated, especially on friends like Dickens, who were constantly being hit up for emergency loans, not only by Hunt himself but by his increasingly bibulous wife. But the innocence, real or feigned, gave Hunt a freshness of eye. Who else but Hunt could have stood in a wintry cabbage patch and declared that the frosty cabbages reminded him of diamonds sparkling? And who else but he could have seen the world anew through the eyes of a fish?

Hunt’s three greatest sonnets deal in turn with a fish as seen by a man, a man as seen by a fish, and a fish transformed, first into a man, then into “a spirit.” The first sonnet gives the human perspective and begins by insulting the fish: “You strange, astonished looking, angle-faced / dreary mouthed, gaping wretches of the sea / gulping salt-water everlastingly.” The fish, not to be outdone, replies, “Amazing monster!” and goes on to mock the human form, all “prong after prong,” concluding with: “I sometimes see of ye an actual pair / Go by! Linked fin by fin! Most odiously.”

But in the third sonnet, Hunt achieved a kind of casual sublimity, especially in the final lines where the now transfigured fish sums up:

Man’s life is warm, glad, sad, twixt loves and graves,
Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,
Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves: –
The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
Quickened with touches of transporting fear.

The beauty of these lines reminds me why Hunt stood high in the esteem of Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth, and that at such rare moments he was not their inferior. Mr. Holden recounts that Hunt and Keats used to compete to see who could write the better sonnet in 15 minutes; on at least one occasion, Hunt composed the manifestly superior poem. His gift demanded constraints to rise above mere facility.

As young men Hunt and his brother John had stood trial for “seditious libel” after writing a scathing denunciation of the prince regent (and future George IV) in their radical newspaper, the Examiner. Both were fined and imprisoned for two years. How cruelly ironic that 40 years later Hunt should himself be the victim of a more persistent libel at the hands of Dickens. He is still in a sense the prisoner of “Bleak House,” unable to extricate himself from the lineaments of Harold Skimpole. As Mr. Holden relates, even his grave in Kensal Green has been vandalized. Only his epitaph, from his poem “Abou Ben Adhem,” remains: “Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.” That is how Leigh Hunt ought to be remembered.

eormsby@nysun.com