William Hazlitt (10 April 177818 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language,"A master of English prose style, a beautifully modulated general essayist, the first great theatre critic in English, the first great art critic, a magnificent political journalist and polemicist ... Hazlitt is both a philosopher and one of the supreme literary critics in the language." Paulin, "Spirit".Jacques Barzun praises Lionel Trilling as just behind Hazlitt, implying that Hazlitt, ahead of Coleridge, Bagehot, and Arnold as well, is in the top rank of English-language literary critics. Quoted in Philip French, Three Honest Men: Edmund Wilson, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling (Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet Press, 1980), cited in Rodden, Trilling, p. 3. placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell."... in the tradition of the English essay, descended from Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Orwell", Hitchens on Display, by George Packer, in The New Yorker, 3 July 2008Irving Howe considered Orwell "the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson". "George Orwell: 'As the bones know' ", by Irving Howe, Harper's Magazine, January 1969. He is also acknowledged as the finest art critic of his age.A. C. Grayling notes that Kenneth Clark "described Hazlitt as the 'best critic of art before Ruskin'." Grayling, p. 380. See also Bromwich, p. 20. Despite his high standing among historians of literature and art, his work is currently little read and mostly out of print."Most of Hazlitt's work is out of print, or unavailable in paperback. He is not studied in most university English courses ...", Paulin, "Spirit"."Both Deane and Heaney had studied Hazlitt at school in Derry in the 1950s – he'd been replaced by Orwell when I took the same A-level course in the 60s, and the diminution of his reputation has been fairly steady until recently." Paulin, "Spirit".
During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats.Grayling, pp. 209–10.
Life and works Background The family of Hazlitt's father were Irish Protestants who moved from the county of Antrim to Tipperary in the early 18th century. Also named William Hazlitt, Hazlitt's father attended the University of Glasgow (where he was taught by Adam Smith),Paulin, Day-Star, p. 313. receiving a master's degree in 1760. Not entirely satisfied with his Presbyterian faith, he became a Unitarian minister in England. In 1764, he became pastor at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where in 1766 he married Grace Loftus, daughter of a recently deceased ironmonger. Of their many children, only three survived infancy. The first of these, John (later known as a portrait painter), was born in 1767 at Marshfield in Gloucestershire, where the Reverend William Hazlitt had accepted a new pastorate after his marriage. In 1770, the elder Hazlitt accepted yet another position and moved with his family to Maidstone, Kent, where his first and only surviving daughter, Margaret (usually known as "Peggy"), was born that same year.Wardle, p. 4.
Childhood, education, young philosopher (1778–1797) Childhood
William, the youngest of the surviving Hazlitt children, was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, in 1778. In 1780, when he was two, his family began a nomadic lifestyle that was to last several years. From Maidstone his father took them to Bandon, County Cork, Ireland; and from Bandon in 1783 to the United States, where the elder Hazlitt preached, lectured, and sought a ministerial call to a liberal congregation. His efforts to obtain a post did not meet with success, although he did exert a certain influence on the founding of the first Unitarian church in Boston.Wardle, p. 16; Wu, p. 33. In 1786–87, the family returned to England and settled in Wem, in Shropshire. Hazlitt would remember little of his years in America, save the taste of barberries."The taste of barberries, which have hung out in the snow during the severity of a North American winter, I have in my mouth still, after an interval of thirty years". Hazlitt, Works, vol. 8, p. 259. (Hereafter, references to Works will imply "Hazlitt, Works".) "In all his works", remarks Hazlitt's biographer and editor P.P. Howe, "the only reference to his stay in America is to the taste of the barberries picked on the hills". Howe, p. 29.
Education Hazlitt was educated at home and at a local school. At age 13 he had the satisfaction of seeing his writing appear in print for the first time, when the Shrewsbury Chronicle published his letter (July 1791) condemning the riots in Birmingham over Joseph Priestley's support for the French Revolution.Bourne, p. 51. In 1793, his father sent him to a Unitarian seminary on what was then the outskirts of London, the New College at Hackney (commonly referred to as Hackney College).Wardle, p. 40, gives the name as the "New Unitarian College at Hackney" but most other reliable sources, e.g. Albrecht, p. 29, call it the "Unitarian New College at Hackney". This Hackney College was a short-lived institution (1786–1796) with no connection to the current college by that name. The schooling he received there, though relatively brief, approximately two years, made a deep and abiding impression on Hazlitt.Wardle, p. 45.
The curriculum at Hackney was very broad, including a grounding in the Greek and Latin classics, mathematics, history, government, science, and, of course, religion.Grayling, p. 32. Much of his education there was along traditional lines; however, the tutelage having been strongly influenced by eminent Dissenting thinkers of the day like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley,Baker, pp. 20–25. there was also much that was nonconformist. Priestley, whom Hazlitt had read and who was also one of his teachers, was an impassioned commentator on political issues of the day. This, along with the turmoil in the wake of the French Revolution, sparked in Hazlitt and his classmates lively debates on these issues, as they saw their world being transformed around them.Wardle, pp. 43–44.
Changes were taking place within the young Hazlitt as well. While, out of respect for his father, Hazlitt never openly broke with his religion, he suffered a loss of faith, and left Hackney before completing his preparation for the ministry.It may have been the case that he was forced to leave for financial reasons, given that "special grants and terms available for Divinity students could be his no more". (Maclean, p. 81) It is also thought however that the college's policy of encouraging open intellectual inquiry proved self-destructive; even faculty members were resigning, and in fact the college closed its doors forever about a year after Hazlitt's departure. See Wardle, pp. 45–46; also Maclean, pp. 78–81.
Although Hazlitt rejected the Unitarian theology,Kinnaird, p. 11. his time at Hackney left him with much more than religious scepticism. He had read widely and formed habits of independent thought and respect for the truth that would remain with him for life.Wardle, pp. 41–45. He had thoroughly absorbed a belief in liberty and the rights of man, and confidence in the idea that the mind was an active force which, by disseminating knowledge in both the sciences and the arts, could reinforce the natural tendency in humanity towards good. The school had impressed upon him the importance of the individual's ability, working both alone and within a mutually supportive community, to effect beneficial change by adhering to strongly held principles. The belief of many Unitarian thinkers in the natural disinterestedness of the human mind had also laid a foundation for the young Hazlitt's own philosophical explorations along those lines. And, though harsh experience and disillusionment later compelled him to qualify some of his early ideas about human nature, he was left with a hatred of tyranny and persecution that he retained to his dying days,Many of these values were also impressed upon him by his father at home, and by reading thinkers who were not Unitarian, but his two years at Hackney College built upon and greatly strengthened them. See Kinnaird, pp. 11–25; Paulin, Day-Star, pp. 8–11. as expressed a quarter-century afterward in the retrospective summing up of his political stance in his 1819 collection of Political Essays: "I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools ... I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and I have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended."Works, vol. 7, p. 7. Quoted in Gilmartin, pp. 95–96.
Young philosopher Returning home, around 1795, his thoughts were directed into more secular channels, encompassing not only politics but, increasingly, modern philosophy, which he had begun to read with fascination at Hackney. In September 1794, he had met William Godwin,Jones, p. 6. the reformist thinker whose recently published Political Justice had taken English intellectual circles by storm. Hazlitt was never to feel entirely in sympathy with Godwin's philosophy, but it gave him much food for thought.Wardle, pp. 44–45. He spent much of his time at home in an intensive study of English, Scottish, and Irish thinkers like John Locke, David Hartley, George Berkeley, and David Hume, together with French thinkers like Claude Adrien Helvétius, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Baron d'Holbach.Maclean, p. 78. From this point onwards, Hazlitt's goal was to become a philosopher. His intense studies focused on man as a social and political animal and, in particular, on the philosophy of mind, a discipline that would later be called psychology.
It was in this period also that he came across Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who became one of the most important influences on the budding philosopher's thinking. He also familiarized himself with the works of Edmund Burke, whose writing style impressed him enormously.Wardle, p. 48. Hazlitt then set about working out a treatise, in painstaking detail, on the "natural disinterestedness of the human mind".Published in 1805 as "An Essay on the Principles of Human Action". See Works, vol. 1. It was Hazlitt's intention to disprove the notion that man is naturally selfish (benevolent actions being rationally modified selfishness, ideally made habitual), a premise fundamental to much of the moral philosophy of Hazlitt's day.This school of thought, the "modern philosophy", was primarily English, descended from John Locke and, originally (as Hazlitt himself insisted in his lectures on philosophy a few years later), Thomas Hobbes. See Bromwich pp. 36, 45–47; Grayling, p. 148; Park, pp. 46–47. The treatise was finally published only in 1805. In the meantime the scope of his reading had broadened and new circumstances had altered the course of his career. Yet, to the end of his life, he would consider himself a philosopher.Wardle, p. 243. See also "A Letter to William Gifford" (1819), in Works, vol. 9, pp. 58–59.
Around 1796, Hazlitt found new inspiration and encouragement from Joseph Fawcett, a retired clergyman and prominent reformer, whose enormous breadth of taste left the young thinker awestruck. From Fawcett, in the words of biographer Ralph Wardle, he imbibed a love for "good fiction and impassioned writing", Fawcett being "a man of keen intelligence who did not scorn the products of the imagination or apologize for his tastes". With him, Hazlitt not only discussed the radical thinkers of their day, but ranged comprehensively over all kinds of literature, from John Milton's Paradise Lost to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. This background is important for understanding the breadth and depth of Hazlitt's own taste in his later critical writings.Wardle, pp. 48–49.