Early Years and Intellectual Formation
William Hazlitt was born on April 10, 1778, in Maidstone, Kent, the youngest surviving child of a Unitarian minister, the Rev. John Hazlitt. The family’s religious dissent shaped William’s lifelong suspicion of authority and his fierce commitment to intellectual liberty. In 1783, seeking to escape the restrictions of England, Rev. Hazlitt took his family to America, settling briefly in Boston and then Pennsylvania. Young William witnessed the aftermath of the Revolutionary War—an experience that would later fuel his passionate essays on liberty and tyranny. The family returned to England in 1787, settling in Wem, Shropshire.
William was an intense, solitary child, given to philosophical speculation. His father intended him for the ministry, and in 1793 he entered Hackney Theological College (often called the “Dissenter’s Oxford”). But the young Hazlitt soon found himself drawn away from theology toward philosophy, particularly the empiricism of John Locke and the radicalism of William Godwin. He abandoned the pulpit for the palette, spending several years trying to become a portrait painter. Though he ultimately failed as an artist (his portraits were technically competent but lacked the “gusto” he would later champion in others), the painter’s discipline of close observation informed every essay he ever wrote.
The Grind of Journalism and the Burden of Debt
By his mid-twenties, Hazlitt had turned to the only trade that would have him: journalism. He wrote for radical newspapers like the Morning Chronicle and the Examiner, covering politics, theatre, and literature. His reporting was fearless: he defended Napoleon Bonaparte long after most British intellectuals had turned against the emperor, and he attacked the government’s repressive measures after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. This political courage came at a cost. He was vilified in the Tory press, blacklisted from many publications, and struggled financially his entire life. At the time of his death, he was nearly destitute.
Personal Turmoil: Love, Failure, and Liber Amoris
Hazlitt’s personal life was as turbulent as his professional one. In 1808, he married Sarah Stoddart, a friend of the essayist Charles Lamb. The marriage was unhappy from early on, marked by poverty, mutual resentment, and finally separation. Far more devastating was his obsessive love for Sarah Walker, the daughter of his landlord, in 1820–21. Hazlitt was then in his early forties; she was nineteen. His unrequited passion—fueled by suspicion, jealousy, and humiliation—drove him to publish Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion (1823), a painfully raw, semi-fictionalized account of the affair. Critics were appalled by its confessional intimacy; readers called it indecent. Yet today, Liber Amoris is recognized as a bold precursor to modern autofiction, a work of almost unbearable honesty about desire and self-deception. He remarried in 1824 to Isabel Bridgewater, but this union also proved unsatisfactory. Hazlitt died on September 18, 1830, in a small lodging in Soho, London, reportedly with only a few friends at his bedside.
Major Works: A Closer Look at Hazlitt’s Essential Books
Hazlitt’s literary output spanned philosophy, politics, drama, poetry, and the familiar essay. Below are his most important works, examined in depth.
On the Principles of Human Action (1805) Summary
This philosophical treatise, written when Hazlitt was only 27, argues against the then-dominant Hobbesian view that all human action is ultimately self-interested. Hazlitt proposes instead that humans possess a natural “disinterestedness”—a capacity to care about others and about their own future selves as if they were separate persons. The book is dense and abstract, drawing on Locke, Hartley, and Godwin, but it laid the groundwork for Hazlitt’s lifelong belief that the imagination can overcome selfishness. Though it sold poorly, the work impressed Coleridge, who called its author a “metaphysical thinker of the first order.”
The Eloquence of the British Senate (1807) Analysis
This was Hazlitt’s first commercially published book. It is a collection of biographical sketches and rhetorical excerpts from major parliamentary speakers, including Pitt, Fox, Burke, and Sheridan. Hazlitt had been reporting on Parliament for the Morning Chronicle, and the book allowed him to turn journalism into art. Each profile captures the speaker’s physical presence, vocal style, and emotional effect on listeners. Burke, for example, is described as “pouring out a torrent of thoughts and images,” while Pitt is praised for “the sharp, decisive tone of authority.” The work foreshadows Hazlitt’s later gift for the prose portrait.
Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817) Summary
This book changed English literary criticism forever. Instead of treating Shakespeare’s characters as moral exemplars or mere plot functions, Hazlitt reads them as psychologically coherent individuals with interior lives. He devotes a chapter to each major play, focusing on the “character” as a real person we can know. Of Hamlet: “It is we who are Hamlet.” Of Iago: “He is an amateur of tragedy.” Hazlitt also compares Shakespeare to other writers (e.g., “Shakespeare’s women are pure, but not weak; his men are strong, but not coarse”). The book was a popular success, reissued several times, and established Hazlitt as a leading critic. Today, it remains a model of empathetic, passionate close reading.
Lectures on the English Poets (1818) Summary
Delivered at the Surrey Institution in London and then published, this series of eight lectures surveys English poetry from Chaucer to Hazlitt’s own day. Each lecture combines historical context with vivid aesthetic judgments. On Chaucer: “He is the father of English poetry, and he is its child.” On Spenser: “He is the poet of the senses, but his senses are moralized.” On Milton: “His poetry is a pure essence of the sublime.” On Wordsworth: “He sees all things in himself.” The concluding lecture, on contemporary poets, famously dismisses the Lake School’s political apostasy while praising Wordsworth’s “originality.” The lectures helped canonize the Romantic poets even as they criticized them.
Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) Summary
Comedy had rarely been treated as serious literary art before Hazlitt. This series examines comic drama and prose from Shakespeare to his own time. He writes brilliantly on Shakespeare’s fools (Touchstone, Falstaff), on Ben Jonson’s “humours,” on Congreve’s wit, and on Sheridan’s stagecraft. A key concept introduced here is the “mixed” nature of great comedy: it must combine laughter with a sense of human fallibility. He also defends low humor (puns, slapstick) as having its own legitimate energy. The lectures are less known than those on the poets, but they remain a foundational text for anyone studying comedy.
Table Talk (1821–1822) Summary
This two-volume collection of essays is Hazlitt’s most accessible and enduring work. The title suggests informal conversation, and the essays live up to it: they range over art, truth, egotism, the fear of death, and the pleasures of painting. Each essay takes a common saying or experience and turns it inside out. Notable pieces include “On the Pleasure of Hating,” “On the Knowledge of Character,” “On Going a Journey,” and “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth.” The style is at its most relaxed and conversational, yet the depth is unsparing. Virginia Woolf called Table Talk “one of the few books that seem to have been written without any thought of a reader—only for the joy of setting down exactly what was in the mind.”
The Spirit of the Age (1825) Summary
Arguably Hazlitt’s masterpiece. It consists of twenty-two prose portraits of his contemporaries, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Bentham, Godwin, and the painter James Northcote. Each portrait is a miniature masterpiece of psycho-literary analysis. Of Coleridge: “He talked on forever; and you wished him to talk on forever. Yet his thoughts were not a stream, but a fountain—welling up, but not flowing away.” Of Wordsworth: “He sees all things in himself. He is the poet of the egoist sublime.” Of Byron: “He writes like a man of the world, who has seen and suffered everything.” Hazlitt does not flatter; he admires where admiration is due, and criticizes where he sees failure (especially political failure, as with Coleridge’s apostasy to conservatism). The book is essential for understanding the Romantic generation in its own words.
The Plain Speaker (1826) Summary
A second major essay collection, less famous than Table Talk but more strenuous and argumentative. The title implies a blunt, unadorned voice. Essays include “On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority,” “On the Pleasure of Hating,” and “On the Spirit of Obligations.” Here Hazlitt is most personal, most controversial, and most willing to attack received opinions directly. The prose is tighter, the epigrams sharper, and the tone often bitter. Yet it contains some of his most quoted lines: “The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.”
Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion (1823) Analysis
This is Hazlitt’s strangest book: a semi-fictionalized account of his obsessive, humiliating love for Sarah Walker, the daughter of his landlord. Written as a series of dialogues and letters, it exposes his jealousy, self-doubt, and sexual torment with almost clinical honesty. Contemporary reviewers called it disgusting and indecent. But later readers, from Robert Louis Stevenson to the French existentialists, recognized it as a pioneering work of confessional autofiction. It breaks every rule of 19th-century decorum. Whether you find it embarrassing or brave, it is impossible to forget.
Literary Remains (posthumous, 1836) Summary
After Hazlitt’s death, his son (also named William Hazlitt) collected unpublished essays, notes, and fragments. The volume includes early philosophical drafts, unfinished portraits, and critical jottings. Though uneven, the Remains helped preserve Hazlitt’s reputation at a time when his books were going out of print. Among the highlights are a long essay on “The Difference Between Writing and Speaking” and a moving memorial to his father.
Among these, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays was Hazlitt’s first popular success. Unlike previous critics who treated Shakespeare’s characters as types or moral examples, Hazlitt read them as fully realized individuals. He famously wrote of Hamlet’s irresolution: “It is we who are Hamlet.” This subjective, empathetic approach—what we now call psychological criticism—was groundbreaking.
The Spirit of the Age remains indispensable for any student of Romanticism. In its pages, Wordsworth appears as a “severe” and “original” genius whose poetry is “a pure essence of nature”; Coleridge is a fallen archangel, a man of “uncommon genius” whose thoughts come “borne on the gusts of genius” but who lacks the will to finish anything; Byron is described as a “sublime” egotist who writes “like a man of the world, who has seen and suffered everything.” No other book captures the contradictory energies of the Romantic generation so sharply.
Key Essays and Recurring Themes
Hazlitt wrote hundreds of essays on topics ranging from Indian jugglers to why great artists are often poor company. Three essays, however, are essential to understanding his worldview.
“On Gusto” (1816)
In this short but explosive essay, Hazlitt introduces one of his most original concepts. Gusto is not mere enthusiasm or skill. It is the quality in art that makes us feel the subject’s physical presence—that “conveys the sense of effort, of something that makes us feel the weight, the solidity, the texture of objects.” To illustrate: Titian’s painting of a dog has gusto because the fur looks warm, thick, and alive. Michelangelo’s figures have gusto because you can feel the “moral strength” in their posture. Conversely, Claude Lorrain’s luminous landscapes, though beautiful, lack gusto because they are “ideal and visionary” without bodily immediacy. Hazlitt extends the concept to literature: Shakespeare’s gusto is “uneven,” flashing out in moments (“the storm scene in Lear”), whereas Milton’s gusto is sustained, a “constant and uniform pressure of the poetic faculty.” This essay remains a cornerstone of aesthetic theory, anticipating later ideas of embodiment and affect.
“On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth” (1827)
This meditative essay, written as Hazlitt entered his fiftieth year, captures a quintessentially Romantic theme: the chasm between youthful hope and aging disillusion. The opening line—“No young man believes he shall ever die”—has become proverbial. Hazlitt argues that young people experience time not as a finite resource but as an endless horizon. This feeling of immortality is not merely a psychological illusion; it is a biological and philosophical truth of how the senses engage with the world. “The sun appears to us to shine with the same brightness as when we first beheld it,” he writes. “The flowers smell as sweet; our heart pants for the same pleasures.” Only with age does death become imaginable—and with that realization comes either despair or, for the wise, a deepened appreciation of each passing moment. The essay’s final paragraphs, which describe the death of his own youthful ambitions, are among the most moving in English prose.
“On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority” (1821)
Hazlitt, who knew social isolation well, here defends the thinker against the world’s suspicion. He argues that superior intelligence does not make one popular, respected, or even understood. Quite the opposite: the intellectual sees through received opinions, which makes the comfortable uncomfortable. The “natural man” distrusts the subtle man. Society either fears the thinker (if the thinker is powerful) or mocks him (if he is weak). Hazlitt notes wryly that “people like to be amused, not instructed”—and the intellectual’s proper business is instruction. He concludes that the only genuine compensation for the thinker is the work itself: the private joy of seeing clearly and saying truly. This essay is a powerful early articulation of the alienation of the intellectual, a theme later explored by figures from Kierkegaard to Edward Said.
Prose Style: The Art of the Unforgettable Sentence
Hazlitt’s style is his signature. While some contemporaries (De Quincey, Lamb) wrote ornate or whimsical prose, Hazlitt aimed for clarity with force. His sentences often move like a boxer’s punches: stance, feint, jab, and then the knockout blow.
Characteristics of the Hazlittian Sentence
Conversational boldness. He writes as he speaks: directly, with exclamations, rhetorical questions, and abrupt changes of direction. Read aloud: “The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.” That antithetical structure (liberty/others, power/self) is Shakespearean in its memorability.
Metaphor drawn from life. Hazlitt avoids stale “poetic” images. Instead, his metaphors come from painting (light, shade, texture), from fighting (thrust, parry, fall), and from the street. Of Coleridge’s conversation: “He talked on forever; and you wished him to talk on forever.” Of a mediocre actor: “He struts and frets his hour upon the stage in a parody of passion.”
Vivid, specific examples. Hazlitt never generalizes without anchoring his generalization in a concrete image. When he praises gusto in painting, he does not say “great artists convey physicality.” He says: “Look at a landscape by Titian: the trees seem to have leaves and sap; the sky seems to be of a particular moment of the day.”
Epigrammatic power. Many of his sentences function as compressed wisdom. Examples: “Prejudice is the child of ignorance.” “The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy.” “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.”
A Note on Structure
Critics have often noted that Hazlitt’s essays can feel loose or rambling. He is not a systematic thinker, nor does he adhere to a strict outline. Paragraphs sometimes jump from observation to observation without explicit connectors. Yet this apparent looseness is deceptive. Hazlitt’s method is associative, following the natural motion of a lively mind. He trusts the reader to keep up. As he wrote in the preface to Table Talk: “I have endeavoured to set down my thoughts as they occurred to me, without any artificial arrangement.” This unpretentious freedom is, paradoxically, a high form of art.
Hazlitt as Critic: Subjectivity Rendered Honest
Before Hazlitt, most English literary criticism was either antiquarian (collecting facts about a text) or moralizing (judging a text by ethical rules). Hazlitt transformed criticism by making taste and feeling central. He famously declared that he wrote “to give a reason for the faith that is in me”—a deliberately theological phrase applied to aesthetic judgment. For Hazlitt, the critic’s job is not to pronounce objective truths but to articulate, as clearly and honestly as possible, the experience of being moved (or unmoved) by a work of art.
This does not mean Hazlitt was undisciplined. His judgments are backed by detailed analysis. In Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, he spends pages examining specific speeches, noting how line breaks and word choices create character. But he never pretends to be neutral. He loves Shakespeare; he respects Milton; he is impatient with Pope. This principled subjectivity—combining rigorous observation with unashamed personal response—became the model for the modern critic. Virginia Woolf, William Empson, and Harold Bloom all owe a debt to Hazlitt’s method.
A Controversial Contemporaneity
Hazlitt was not always right. He dismissed The Cenci by Shelley as “a mere exercise of abstract intellect.” He undervalued Jane Austen (though she was then little known). He was often harsh on his friend Coleridge in print, causing a permanent rift. Yet even his errors are instructive; they show a critic who engages directly, without hedging or politeness. He would rather be wrong and interesting than correct and dull.
Famous Quotations in Context
“Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions.” — From Lectures on the English Poets. This definition opposed the Neoclassical view of poetry as “imitation” and aligned Hazlitt with the Romantic emphasis on feeling.
“We do not connect the same feelings with the works of art as with those of Nature.” — From On Gusto. He argues that a painting of a storm is not the same as a real storm; art offers mediated, not immediate, sensation. Yet the best art (with gusto) tricks the senses into near-immediacy.
“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.” — From Political Essays. This antithesis distills Hazlitt’s radical politics: true freedom requires fellow-feeling; the lust for power is merely extended egotism.
“Life is the art of being well deceived.” — From On the Knowledge of Character. A skeptical, almost Wildean remark: we cannot live without some illusions, especially about other people’s motives. But Hazlitt adds, characteristically, that the wise person deceives himself as little as possible.
Legacy: Why Hazlitt Still Matters
At the time of his death, Hazlitt’s reputation was at a low ebb. The Victorian public found him too aggressive, too personal, too political. But the 20th century rediscovered him with enthusiasm. William Butler Yeats admired his “fiery, reckless, and bitter” honesty. Virginia Woolf, in The Common Reader, praised his ability to “make a phrase that will stick like a burr.” Perhaps his greatest champion was the novelist W. Somerset Maugham, who wrote in The Summing Up:
“Hazlitt is the best writer of English prose of his time. His style is vivid, bracing, and alive. He never wrote a dull sentence in his life. He is not so elegant as Lamb, nor so grand as De Quincey; but he is more human than either. He gives you the sense of a man thinking on his feet, with all his passions engaged.”
Today, Hazlitt’s influence can be seen across many genres:
- Literary criticism (from Edmund Wilson to James Wood) relies on his model of passionate, close reading.
- The personal essay continues his tradition of mixing autobiography with philosophy.
- Political journalism that refuses to separate ethics from aesthetics echoes his commitment.
- Confessional writing (memoirs, autofiction) springs from the same raw nerve he exposed in Liber Amoris.
Furthermore, recent scholarly attention has revived his philosophical work. On the Principles of Human Action is now seen as a significant contribution to moral psychology, anticipating later debates about altruism and empathy.
A Final Invitation
William Hazlitt does not ask for quiet admiration. He demands, instead, a reader who will meet him halfway: alert, skeptical, and willing to feel. His essays are not monuments but living conversations. They argue with you. They surprise you. They sometimes offend you. And they always, always reward the attention you give them. If you have not yet read him, begin with “On Going a Journey” (a celebration of solitary walking) or “The Fight” (an astonishing blow-by-blow account of a prize fight). Then move to The Spirit of the Age. By then, you will be hooked—and you will understand why Virginia Woolf called him “one of the few writers who make you feel that you are in the presence of a living mind.”
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