William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830)

William Hazlitt was born in Rose Yard in Maidstone on 10 April 1778. His  mother, Grace Loftus, was from a Dissenting family in Cambridgeshire and his father, the Reverend William Hazlitt, was a Unitarian minister from Co. Tipperary. At the time of William's birth, he was the minister for the Unitarian Church inn Market Street, Maidstone.

The young Hazlitt accompanied his father to America in 1783 but returned to England in 1786 to be educated at the Unitarian New College in Hackney, though he left before completing his studies. While living with his older brother, John, a successful painter of miniature portraits, he took an interest in painting and tried to earn a living as a portrait painter.

It was around this time that Hazlitt met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through Coleridge, he was introduced to the famous Lakeland writers of the time, becoming friends with Wordsworth and Southey. In 1803, he then met Charles Lamb with whom he formed a lifelong friendship.

Alongside his painting, Hazlitt was keenly interested in politics and philosophy and published his first book, A Study of the Principles of Human Action, in 1805. By 1812, he was working as a parliamentary reporter and soon developed a career as a journalist, from which he earned a reasonable living. He also met John Hunt, publisher of The Examiner, and his younger brother Leigh, the poet and essayist.

Hazlitt contributed a number of articles to The Examiner in a regular column called 'The Round Table', which were collected into a book in early 1817. The range of topics included Shakespeare, Milton, aesthetics, and art criticism, as well as dramatic and social criticism.

In a collection of critical essays, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, Hazlitt took a new approach. He assumed his readers were fellow lovers of Shakespeare, sharing with them what he liked beset about the plays - the first edition sold out in 6 weeks.

This was followed by Table-Talk - a series of articles written in the 'familiar style', much admired by Hazlitt. His writing style became much closer to the model of the familiar essay, rather than the periodical essay, in an attempt to combine the literary and conversational. These works attracted some attention during Hazlitt's lifetime, but it was only long after his death that they became truly admired.

Today Hazlitt is renowned as the first major drama critic in English, as well as the first major art critic, and is considered one of the most gifted literary and general essayists in English. He died in 1830 in a rooming-house in Soho and is buried in St. Anne's Churchyard nearby.