William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830)

William Hazlitt is best known as a brilliant essayist and critic. His essays include criticism of art, poetry, fiction, and drama. He wrote social and political commentary, portraits of major writers and political figures of his age, and a biography of his great hero, Napoleon. He had intended to follow his father into the Unitarian ministry but became instead a painter of portraits before settling into a career as a writer. His earliest writing is philosophical, and his key ideas are incorporated into his later work as a critic and conversational essayist.

Hazlitt was acquainted with many of the leading figures of the period, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, the philosopher William Godwin, and the essayists Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb. Like other political radicals of the time, he was persecuted by the Tory press, being referred to disparagingly by one periodical as belonging, with Keats and Hunt, to the ‘Cockney School’. His most notorious work, Liber Amoris (1823), gave ammunition to his enemies by candidly recounting the story of his infatuation with Sarah Walker, the daughter of his landlady, for whom he divorced his wife only to be rejected. He died in 1830, at the age of 52.

Hazlitt was educated at New College, Hackney, a Dissenting academy, where he acquired a thorough grounding in philosophy and literature. He left prematurely, but not before he had begun developing the ideas that he later described as his ‘metaphysical discovery’ and that formed the core arguments of his first book, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805). In this he argues against psychological egoism, materialism, associationism, and a Lockean account of personal identity. He argues for the formative power of the mind and the natural disinterestedness of human action regarding future benefits for oneself and others.