Leigh Hunt’s description of the subject matter of his new journal – the Indicator – which Daisy Hay describes as “an antidote to The Examiner” – the other journal Hunt had been producing which focused critically on political and social issues. When, on August 16, 1819, a group of citizens met in St. Peter’s Fields to demand reform, they were attacked by mounted yeomandry, Eleven of the protesters were killed and hundreds were injured, including women and children. The mainstream press sided with the soldiers, but there there was a groundswell of support for their victims. With the government sensitive to “blasphemous and seditions libel”, Hunt decided to split his publishing energies in two. He continued publishing the Examiner, but began his new venture which he introduces as follows:
The Indicator will attend to no subject whatsoever of immediate or temporary interest. His business is with the honey in the old woods. The Editor has enough to agitate his spirits during the present eventual times, in another periodical work; and he is willing to be so agitated, but as he is accustomed to use his pen, as habitually as a bird his pinion, and to betake himself with it into the nests and bowers of more lasting speculations, when he as done with public ones, he is determined to keep those haunts of his recreation free from all noise and wrangling, both for his own pleasure and for those who may chuse to accompany him.
Young Romantics: The Shelley’s, Byron, And Other Tangled Lives, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2010)