108 Facts About William Hazlitt

1.

William Hazlitt was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher.

2.

William Hazlitt is considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell.

3.

William Hazlitt is acknowledged as the finest art critic of his age.

4.

The family of William Hazlitt's father were Irish Protestants who moved from the county of Antrim to Tipperary in the early 18th century.

5.

The first of these, John, was born in 1767 at Marshfield in Gloucestershire, where the Reverend William Hazlitt had accepted a new pastorate after his marriage.

6.

In 1770, the elder William Hazlitt accepted yet another position and moved with his family to Maidstone, Kent, where his first and only surviving daughter, Margaret, was born that same year.

7.

William, the youngest of the surviving Hazlitt children, was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, in 1778.

8.

From Maidstone his father took them to Bandon, County Cork, Ireland; and from Bandon in 1783 to the United States, where the elder William Hazlitt preached, lectured, and sought a ministerial call to a liberal congregation.

9.

William Hazlitt would remember little of his years in America, save the taste of barberries.

10.

William Hazlitt was educated at home and at a local school.

11.

Priestley, whom William Hazlitt had read and who was one of his teachers, was an impassioned commentator on political issues of the day.

12.

William Hazlitt had read widely and formed habits of independent thought and respect for the truth that would remain with him for life.

13.

William Hazlitt 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.

14.

William Hazlitt was never to feel entirely in sympathy with Godwin's philosophy, but it gave him much food for thought.

15.

William Hazlitt 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 Helvetius, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Baron d'Holbach.

16.

From this point onwards, William Hazlitt's goal was to become a philosopher.

17.

William Hazlitt familiarized himself with the works of Edmund Burke, whose writing style impressed him enormously.

18.

William Hazlitt then set about working out a treatise, in painstaking detail, on the "natural disinterestedness of the human mind".

19.

Around 1796, William 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.

20.

William Hazlitt spent evenings with delight in London's theatrical world, an aesthetic experience that would prove, somewhat later, of seminal importance to his mature critical work.

21.

In large part William Hazlitt was then living a decidedly contemplative existence, one somewhat frustrated by his failure to express on paper the thoughts and feelings that were churning within him.

22.

That William Hazlitt learned to express his thoughts "in motley imagery or quaint allusion", that his understanding "ever found a language to express itself," was, he openly acknowledged, something he owed to Coleridge.

23.

Meanwhile, the fact remained that William Hazlitt had chosen not to follow a pastoral vocation.

24.

William Hazlitt visited various picture galleries, and he began to get work doing portraits, painting somewhat in the style of Rembrandt.

25.

Later in 1802, William Hazlitt was commissioned to travel to Paris and copy several works of the Old Masters hanging in The Louvre.

26.

William Hazlitt happened to catch sight of Napoleon, a man he idolised as the rescuer of the common man from the oppression of royal "Legitimacy".

27.

Back in England, William Hazlitt again travelled up into the country, having obtained several commissions to paint portraits.

28.

William Hazlitt aimed to create the best pictures he could, whether they flattered their subjects or not, and neither poet was satisfied with his result, though Wordsworth and their mutual friend Robert Southey considered his portrait of Coleridge a better likeness than one by the celebrated James Northcote.

29.

William Hazlitt frequented the society of the Lambs for the next several years, from 1806 often attending their famous "Wednesdays" and later "Thursdays" literary salons.

30.

William Hazlitt therefore was commissioned to abridge and write a preface to a now obscure work of mental philosophy, The Light of Nature Pursued by Abraham Tucker, which appeared in 1807 and may have had some influence on his own later thinking.

31.

Slowly William Hazlitt began to find enough work to eke out a bare living.

32.

William Hazlitt's philippic, dismissing Malthus's argument on population limits as sycophantic rhetoric to flatter the rich, since large swathes of uncultivated land lay all round England, has been hailed as "the most substantial, comprehensive, and brilliant of the Romantic ripostes to Malthus".

33.

Also in 1807 William Hazlitt undertook a compilation of parliamentary speeches, published that year as The Eloquence of the British Senate.

34.

William Hazlitt was able to find more work as a portrait painter as well.

35.

In May 1808, William Hazlitt married Sarah Stoddart, a friend of Mary Lamb and sister of John Stoddart, a journalist who became editor of The Times newspaper in 1814.

36.

Miss Stoddart, an unconventional woman, accepted William Hazlitt and tolerated his eccentricities just as he, with his own somewhat offbeat individualism, accepted her.

37.

The couple had three sons over the next few years, Only one of their children, William Hazlitt, born in 1811, survived infancy.

38.

In January 1812 William Hazlitt embarked on a sometime career as a lecturer, in this first instance by delivering a series of talks on the British philosophers at the Russell Institution in London.

39.

The year 1812 seems to have been the last in which William Hazlitt persisted seriously in his ambition to make a career as a painter.

40.

In October 1812, William Hazlitt was hired by The Morning Chronicle as a parliamentary reporter.

41.

William Hazlitt admired both as champions of liberty, and befriended especially the younger Hunt, who found work for him.

42.

William Hazlitt began to contribute miscellaneous essays to The Examiner in 1813, and the scope of his work for the Chronicle was expanded to include drama criticism, literary criticism, and political essays.

43.

William Hazlitt was to write extensively about both Milton and Bentham over the next few years.

44.

William Hazlitt's self-esteem received an added boost when he was invited to contribute to the quarterly The Edinburgh Review, the most distinguished periodical on the Whig side of the political fence.

45.

William Hazlitt continued to produce articles on miscellaneous topics for The Examiner and other periodicals, including political diatribes against any who he felt ignored or minimised the needs and rights of the common man.

46.

Lamb, who tried to remain uninvolved politically, tolerated his abrasiveness, and that friendship managed to survive, if only just barely in the face of William Hazlitt's growing bitterness, short temper, and propensity for hurling invective at friends and foes alike.

47.

For relief from all that weighed on his mind, William Hazlitt became a passionate player at a kind of racquet ball similar to the game of Fives in that it was played against a wall.

48.

William Hazlitt competed with savage intensity, dashing around the court like a madman, drenched in sweat, and was accounted a good player.

49.

Many of the components of William Hazlitt's style begin to take shape in these Round Table essays.

50.

William Hazlitt found relief by a change of course, shifting the focus of his analysis from the acting of Shakespeare's plays to the substance of the works themselves.

51.

William Hazlitt then delivered lectures on dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare, which were published as Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth.

52.

William Hazlitt was attacked brutally in The Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine, both Tory publications.

53.

One Blackwood's article mocked him as "pimpled William Hazlitt", accused him of ignorance, dishonesty, and obscenity, and incorporated vague physical threats.

54.

The Quarterly Review issued a review of William Hazlitt's published lectures in which he was condemned as ignorant and his writing as unintelligible.

55.

William Hazlitt's lecturing in particular had drawn to Hazlitt a small group of admirers.

56.

William Hazlitt's mood was not improved by the fact that by now there was no pretence of keeping up appearances: his marriage had failed.

57.

William Hazlitt had been visiting prostitutes and displayed more idealised amorous inclinations toward a number of women whose names are lost to history.

58.

William Hazlitt had to spend time in London in these years.

59.

Immediately, William Hazlitt became infatuated with Miss Walker, more than 22 years his junior.

60.

William Hazlitt had aspirations to better herself, and a famous author seemed like a prize catch, but she never really understood Hazlitt.

61.

William Hazlitt discovered the truth about Tomkins, and from then on his jealousy and suspicions of Sarah Walker's real character afforded him little rest.

62.

William Hazlitt's friend reported that the attempt seemed to be about to succeed, but she prevented him from taking the ultimate liberty.

63.

Not quite like any other essay by William Hazlitt, it proved to be one of his most popular, was frequently reprinted after his death, and nearly two centuries later was judged to be "one of the most passionately written pieces of prose in the late Romantic period".

64.

In Table-Talk, William Hazlitt had found the most congenial format for this thoughts and observations.

65.

William Hazlitt illustrated his points with bright imagery and pointed analogies, among which were woven pithy quotations drawn from the history of English literature, primarily the poets, from Chaucer to his contemporaries Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats.

66.

In 1823 William Hazlitt published anonymously Characteristics: In the Manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims, a collection of aphorisms modelled explicitly, as William Hazlitt noted in his preface, on the Maximes of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld.

67.

At the beginning of 1824, though worn out by thwarted passion and the venomous attacks on his character following Liber Amoris, William Hazlitt was beginning to recover his equilibrium.

68.

William Hazlitt found relief, finally, from the Sarah Walker imbroglio.

69.

In 1823, William Hazlitt had met Isabella Bridgwater, who married him in March or April 1824, of necessity in Scotland, as William Hazlitt's divorce was not recognised in England.

70.

William Hazlitt had already devoted years to pondering much of the thinking espoused by several of these figures.

71.

Thoroughly immersed in the Malthusian controversy, for example, William Hazlitt had published A Reply to the Essay on Population as early as 1807, and the essay on Malthus is a distillation of William Hazlitt's earlier criticisms.

72.

Where he finds it applicable, William Hazlitt brings his subjects together in pairs, setting off one against the other, although sometimes his complex comparisons bring out unexpected similarities, as well as differences, between temperaments that otherwise appear to be at opposite poles, as in his reflections on Scott and Byron.

73.

William Hazlitt had earlier directed some of his most vitriolic attacks against them for having replaced the humanistic and revolutionary ideas of their earlier years with staunch support of the Establishment.

74.

Indirectly apologising for his earlier tirade, William Hazlitt here brings in a list of writers and artists, like Milton and Poussin, for whom Wordsworth did show appreciation.

75.

Coleridge, whom William Hazlitt had once idolised, gets special attention, but, again, with an attempt to moderate earlier criticisms.

76.

At an earlier time William Hazlitt had dismissed most of Coleridge's prose as "dreary trash".

77.

Yet William Hazlitt goes out of his way to admire where he can.

78.

And, despite interludes of illness, as well as the miseries of coach travel and the dishonesty of some hotel keepers and coach drivers, William Hazlitt managed to enjoy himself.

79.

William Hazlitt remained with his wife in Paris for more than three months, eagerly exploring the museums, attending the theatres, wandering the streets, and mingling with the people.

80.

William Hazlitt was especially glad to be able to return to the Louvre and revisit the masterpieces he had adored twenty years earlier, recording for his readers all of his renewed impressions of canvases by Guido, Poussin, and Titian, among others.

81.

William Hazlitt was pleased to meet and befriend Henri Beyle, now better known by his nom de plume of Stendhal, who had discovered much to like in Hazlitt's writings, as Hazlitt had in his.

82.

William Hazlitt was constantly considering the manners of the people and the differences between the English and the French.

83.

William Hazlitt spent much time with his old friend Leigh Hunt, now in residence there.

84.

William Hazlitt was ambivalent about Rome, the farthest point of his journey.

85.

William Hazlitt was so enchanted with the region even apart from its personal and literary associations that he remained there with his wife for three months, renting a floor of a farmhouse named "Gelamont" outside of town, where "every thing was perfectly clean and commodious".

86.

William Hazlitt continued to provide a stream of contributions to various periodicals, primarily The New Monthly Magazine.

87.

William Hazlitt gathered previously published essays for the collection The Plain Speaker, writing a few new ones in the process.

88.

William Hazlitt oversaw the publication in book form of his account of his recent Continental tour.

89.

Now Sir Walter Scott was writing his own life of Napoleon, from a strictly conservative point of view, and William Hazlitt wanted to produce one from a countervailing, liberal perspective.

90.

Always fascinated by artists in their old age, William Hazlitt was especially interested in the painter James Northcote, student and later biographer of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a Royal Academician.

91.

William Hazlitt was oblivious to the surroundings and tolerated the grumpiness.

92.

William Hazlitt felt such a closeness to the old artist that in his conversations, Northcote was transformed into a kind of alter ego.

93.

Northcote denied the words were his; and William Hazlitt was shielded from the consequences to a degree by his residing in Paris, where he was at work on what he thought would be his masterpiece.

94.

William Hazlitt was perhaps overly self-disparaging in this self-portrait, but it opens a window on the kind of life Hazlitt was leading at this time, and how he evaluated it in contrast to the lives of his more overtly successful contemporaries.

95.

William Hazlitt "had long been convinced that Napoleon was the greatest man of his era, the apostle of freedom, a born leader of men in the old heroic mould: he had thrilled to his triumphs over 'legitimacy' and suffered real anguish at his downfall".

96.

William Hazlitt's son came to visit, and conflicts broke out between him and his father that drove a wedge between William Hazlitt and his second wife: their marriage was by now in free fall.

97.

On returning to London with his son in August 1827, William Hazlitt was shocked to discover that his wife, still in Paris, was leaving him.

98.

William Hazlitt settled in modest lodgings on Half-Moon Street, and thereafter waged an unending battle against poverty, as he found himself forced to grind out a stream of mostly undistinguished articles for weeklies like The Atlas to generate desperately needed cash.

99.

William Hazlitt spent as much time, apparently, at Winterslow as he did in London.

100.

William Hazlitt managed to complete The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte shortly before his death, but did not live to see it published in its entirety.

101.

In 1828, William Hazlitt found work reviewing for the theatre again.

102.

William Hazlitt found some time to return to his earlier philosophical pursuits, including popularised presentations of the thoughts expressed in earlier writings.

103.

William Hazlitt began contributing to The Edinburgh Review; paying better than the other journals, it helped stave off hunger.

104.

William Hazlitt continued to turn out articles for The Atlas, The London Weekly Review, and now The Court Journal.

105.

William Hazlitt's works having fallen out of print, Hazlitt's reputation declined.

106.

William Hazlitt's reputation has continued to rise, and now many contemporary thinkers, poets, and scholars consider him one of the greatest critics in the English language, and its finest essayist.

107.

Grayling, William Hazlitt's gravestone was restored in St Anne's Churchyard, and unveiled by Michael Foot.

108.

The last place William Hazlitt lived in, on Frith Street in London, is a hotel, William Hazlitt's.