William Hazlitt 

William Hazlitt was an English radical essayist and polemicist. He was born on 12th April 1778 in Maidstone, Kent, England and died on 18th September 1830 in Soho, London aged 52. 

“Table Talk” (1821)
“The Plain Speaker” (1826)Biography

1778: William Hazlitt was born on12th April at Maidstone in Kent, England. He was the son of an Irish Unitarian Preacher and because his father had supported the American Revolution he was forced to take his family back to Ireland to escape persecution. He was educated at the New Unitarian College in Hackney, London.

1787: The Hazlitt family return to England and settle in Wem, Shropshire.

1791: Still a radical his father is one of those protesting at the persecution of Joseph Priestley in Birmingham.

1795: He is sent to be trained at the New Unitarian College in Hackney, London which had been founded by Priestley.

1796: He meets the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge then training to become a Unitarian Minister in Shrewsbury, who encourages him to write “The Principles of Human Action”.

1797: Losing his desire to become a radical Unitarian William Hazlitt leaves the college. Whilst in London he meets a number of influential radicals including Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron. He wanted to become a portrait painter but with no commissions and little success he decided on becoming a writer.

1806: He publishes his first major work “Free Thoughts on Public Affairs” which was an attack on Prime Minister William Pitt and his Government, especially in foreign policy. He opposes the war with France and the consequent heavy taxation. He next writes a succession of pamphlets about political corruption and the need to change the system of voting. He also begins to write for “The Times” newspaper as his friend Thomas Barnes is the parliamentary reporter and then became the Editor.

1808: He marries Sarah Stoddart at St. Andrew’s Church, Holborn, London. She was the sister of the Editor of “The Times” newspaper.

1813: He is taken on as the parliamentary reporter for “The Morning Chronicle” a newspaper with Whig leanings, however he criticised both the Tories and the Whigs with equal enthusiasm. He also writes scathing articles for “The Examiner”, the Radical journal edited by Leigh Hunt. Never rich he has to write for many other journals such as the “Edinburgh Review”, “The Yellow Dwarf” and the “London Magazine” to try and make ends meet. Besides politics he writes on art, drama and literature.

1817: He writes the book “Characters of Shakespeare”.

1818: He publishes“Lectures on the English Poets”.

1819: He writes “Political Essays with Sketches of Public Characters” and “The Spirit of the Age”.

1822: He gets divorced from his wife in Edinburgh due to an affair with his maid Sarah Walker.

1824: He marries Isabella Bridgewater at Coldstream, Scotland on 17th July as his divorce was not legally recognised in England but the relationship only lasted for one year.

1826: He writes “Contemporary Portraits”.

1828: He begins writing his “Life of Napoleon Bonaparte” which he completes in 1830 although his last years are dogged by ill health.

William Hazlitt died on 18th September 1830 in Soho, London, England in poverty, probably due to stomach cancer or a burst ulcer. He was buried in St. Anne’s Churchyard in Dean Street, Soho, London. England.

In 1798 the twenty-year-old Hazlitt walked twelve miles to Shrewsbury to hear Samuel Taylor Coleridge preach at the Unitarian church in the town and two days later he invited him to stay with his family at Wem. He described Coleridge’s sermon as “if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in the solemn silence through the universe”. He also compared Coleridge to John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness and feeding on locusts and wild honey. He was to meet William Wordsworth later at Coleridge’s house in Nether Stowey in Somerset when he stayed there for three weeks. Later he was to write “Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner is his most remarkable performance, and the only one that I could point out to anyone as giving an adequate idea of his great natural powers. … He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on forever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from off his feet”. So, he was quick to admire other writers but equally quick to condemn them later if he felt they did not live up to his standards.

He was widely read from William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon to the philosophers George Berkeley, David Hume and Michel de Montaigne. He was particularly influenced by the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke and besides the Lake Poets he was an admirer of Algernon Charles Swinburne and the English Radical William Cobbett. He wrote positively of the work of John Keats when the critics of the day were less than positive. In fact, his influences ranged from The Elizabethan and Restoration writers through the eighteenth century up to his contemporaries. 

His humanistic essays always marked him out as a religious sceptic, and a political radical and he used everyday language to appeal to all classes of people especially the down trodden working class. When Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey turned away from their radical youth he was extremely scathing of them all in print in his essays, and particularly in his articles in London newspapers, and their friendships ended a quarter of a century after they had all met. He was always an individual who couldn’t cope with society and made enemies frequently.

After his death his writings fell largely out of print and his reputation began to fall. It was in the late 1990’s that a major critical reassessment occurred and he began to be reprinted. In 1998 “The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style” was published by Tom Paulin and in 2000 “Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt” was published by the philosopher A.C. Grayling. After that his star has continued to rise once more and many scholars consider him one of the greatest critics in the English language and its greatest essayist. In 2003 the former Labour Party leader Michael Foot unveiled a restored gravestone in St Anne’s Churchyard in London and a Hazlitt Society was then formed. 

More information can be found on Britain Unlimited’s page on Hazlitt here.

List of works by Hazlitt.