This article is about the English literary critic and essayist. For other people with the same name, see William Hazlitt (disambiguation).
19th-century English essayist and critic
William Hazlitt
Self-portrait from about 1802
Born
(1778-04-10)10 April 1778 Maidstone, Kent, England
Died
18 September 1830(1830-09-18) (aged 52) Soho, London, England
Occupation
Essayist
literary critic
painter
philosopher
Education
New College at Hackney
Notable works
Characters of Shakespear's Plays
Table-Talk
The Spirit of the Age
Spouse
Sarah Stoddart
(m. 1808; div. 1822)
Isabella Bridgewater
(m. 1824)
Children
William Hazlitt
Parents
William Hazlitt (father)
Relatives
John Hazlitt (brother)
William Carew Hazlitt (grandson)
William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language,[1][2] placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell.[3][4] He is also acknowledged as the finest art critic of his age.[5] Despite his high standing among historians of literature and art, his work is currently little read and mostly out of print.[6][7]
During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats.[8]
^"A master of English prose style, a beautifully modulated general essayist, the first great theatre critic in English, the first great art critic, a magnificent political journalist and polemicist ... Hazlitt is both a philosopher and one of the supreme literary critics in the language." Paulin, "Spirit".
^Jacques Barzun praises Lionel Trilling as just behind Hazlitt, implying that Hazlitt, ahead of Coleridge, Bagehot, and Arnold as well, is in the top rank of English-language literary critics. Quoted in Philip French, Three Honest Men: Edmund Wilson, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling (Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet Press, 1980), cited in Rodden, Trilling, p. 3.
^"... in the tradition of the English essay, descended from Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Orwell", Hitchens on Display, by George Packer, in The New Yorker, 3 July 2008
^Irving Howe considered Orwell "the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson". "George Orwell: 'As the bones know' ", by Irving Howe, Harper's Magazine, January 1969.
^A. C. Grayling notes that Kenneth Clark "described Hazlitt as the 'best critic of art before Ruskin'." Grayling, p. 380. See also Bromwich, p. 20.
^"Most of Hazlitt's work is out of print, or unavailable in paperback. He is not studied in most university English courses ...", Paulin, "Spirit".
^"Both Deane and Heaney had studied Hazlitt at school in Derry in the 1950s – he'd been replaced by Orwell when I took the same A-level course in the 60s, and the diminution of his reputation has been fairly steady until recently." Paulin, "Spirit".
WilliamHazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher....
William Carew Hazlitt (22 August 1834 – 8 September 1913), known professionally as W. Carew Hazlitt, was an English lawyer, bibliographer, editor and...
luminaries as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and WilliamHazlitt, Lamb was at the centre of a major literary circle...
a fourth estate of the realm." In 1821, WilliamHazlitt applied the term to an individual journalist, William Cobbett, and the phrase soon became well...
Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt (1774–1843) was an English journalist and walker, and wife of the essayist WilliamHazlitt. She was born in 1774, the only daughter...
meetings and seditious writings. Wilberforce's actions led the essayist WilliamHazlitt to condemn him as one "who preaches vital Christianity to untutored...
Henry Hazlitt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He was a collateral descendant of the British essayist William Hazlitt...
judgment he makes over the course of the play, Polonius is described by WilliamHazlitt as a "sincere" father, but also "a busy-body, [who] is accordingly...
century English essayist, literary critic, and social commentator WilliamHazlitt, portraying 25 men, mostly British, whom he believed to represent significant...
reviews was written by WilliamHazlitt, literary critic and Romantic writer, who criticized the fragmentary nature of the work. Hazlitt said that the poem...
Zimran were Abihen, Molich and Narim. Academics such as Jan Retsö and WilliamHazlitt (registrar) have suggested that the descendants of Zimran are the same...
principles. He was the centre of the Hampstead-based group that included WilliamHazlitt and Charles Lamb, known as the "Hunt circle". Hunt also introduced...
Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters is a collection of essays by WilliamHazlitt, an English political journalist and cultural critic. Published in...
Louis Pierre Vieillot, French ornithologist (b. 1748) September 18 – WilliamHazlitt, English essayist (b. 1778) September 23 Alice Flowerdew, British teacher...
literary merits of WilliamHazlitt's Liber Amoris, a deeply personal account of frustrated love that is quite unlike anything else Hazlitt ever wrote. Wardle...
essayists and critics, WilliamHazlitt (1778–1830). Hazlitt's father moved their family there when William was just a child. Hazlitt senior became the Unitarian...
Romanticist critics in particular, among them William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and WilliamHazlitt, are known for interpreting Satan as a hero...
best-known tragedienne of the 18th century. Contemporaneous critic WilliamHazlitt dubbed Siddons as "tragedy personified". She was the elder sister of...
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