William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He worked in an age crowded with writers who later became central to 19th-century literature, and he knew many of them personally, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. Hazlitt is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, often placed with Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He is also acknowledged as the finest art critic of his age, though much of his work is now little read and mostly out of print.

Hazlitt was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, the youngest surviving child of the Reverend William Hazlitt and Grace Loftus. His father, an Irish Protestant by family background, had studied at the University of Glasgow, where he was taught by Adam Smith, and later became a Unitarian minister in England. Hazlitt’s childhood was unsettled in geography but rich in exposure. In 1780 the family left Maidstone for Bandon, County Cork, and in 1783 moved to the United States, where his father preached, lectured, and sought a ministerial call to a liberal congregation. The family returned to England in 1786–87 and settled in Wem, Shropshire.

His education helped form the independent temper that marked his writing. Hazlitt was taught at home and at a local school, and at thirteen saw his work in print for the first time when the Shrewsbury Chronicle published his 1791 letter condemning the Birmingham riots over Joseph Priestley’s support for the French Revolution. In 1793 his father sent him to the New College at Hackney, a Unitarian seminary near London. He stayed for about two years, but the broad curriculum, including classics, mathematics, history, government, science, and religion, left a strong mark.

Hackney also placed Hazlitt among the ideas of Dissenting thinkers such as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. The French Revolution, political debate, and Priestley’s example stirred him and his classmates. Hazlitt eventually lost his faith and left before completing preparation for the ministry, yet the school gave him habits he kept: wide reading, independent thought, respect for truth, belief in liberty and the rights of man, and a lasting hatred of tyranny and persecution. In his 1819 collection Political Essays, he looked back on that political stance with sharp plainness, writing of “a hatred of tyranny” and “a contempt for its tools.”

After returning home around 1795, Hazlitt turned more fully toward modern philosophy. He read English, Scottish, Irish, and French thinkers, including John Locke, David Hartley, George Berkeley, David Hume, Claude Adrien Helvétius, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Baron d’Holbach. He also encountered William Godwin, whose Political Justice gave him much to consider, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who became one of his most important influences. Edmund Burke’s style impressed him deeply. Hazlitt’s strength as a writer grew from this mix of argument, feeling, reading, and resistance to power. His words still carry force because they come from a mind trained to question, to judge closely, and to speak without bending before bare authority.