the first editor of the British daily broadsheet newspaper The Daily Telegraph. Lacking the ability to become an artist, Hunt instead took up a career in journalism. He was employed as a sub-editor for the Radical publication The Constitutional from 1837 until 1838, where he worked alongside William Makepeace Thackeray and Douglas Jerrold. In 1838 he went north where he worked as an editor for first the Cheshire Reformer, then the Glasgow Argus. He returned to London in 1840, where for the next several years he contributed to a variety of periodicals, co-founded The Leader with George Henry Lewes, and wrote a novel, The Foster-Brother: A tale of the War of Chiozza (1845).
