William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt (1778-1830), English essayist and critic, famous for the lucidity and brilliance, in both style and content, of his many essays.

Hazlitt was born on April 10, 1778, the son of a Unitarian minister, in Maidstone, Kent. He spent a short time at the Unitarian theological seminary in Hackney but soon abandoned the ministry to study painting and philosophy. In 1807 he published A Reply to Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principles of Population and The Eloquence of the British Senate, which contained character studies of the younger Pitt and Edmund Burke among others. In 1812 he became drama critic for the London Morning Chronicle and a frequent contributor to several periodicals. His first book, The Round Table (1817), was a collection of essays from his articles in the Examiner, owned by his friend the essayist Leigh Hunt. Two of his most famous collections, Table Talk (1821-1822) and The Plain Speaker (1826), cover a variety of subjects ranging from art and philosophy to politics and prizefighting. These works helped to establish Hazlitt's reputation as the most versatile critic of his day. He was close friends with several leading literary figures, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb. The Spirit of the Age (1825), a work that is regarded as his critical masterpiece, contains valuable biographical sketches of these writers and of other contemporary intellectual leaders.

Hazlitt lectured extensively on English drama. He collected his lectures and some of his articles in Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), Lectures on the English Poets (1818), Views of the English Stage (1818), Essays on the English Comic Writers (1819), and Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1821). With these works Hazlitt established himself as one of the foremost literary critics of the Romantic period and as a master of the informal essay, as well as an important critical historian at a time when no history of English literature existed. His admiration for Napoleon led him to write a Life of Napoleon (4 vols., 1828-1830). Hazlitt is regarded as one of the greatest masters of English prose; his smooth, colourful style greatly influenced both his contemporaries and many subsequent writers. He died on September 18, 1830, in London.