Hazlitt

Hazlitt
Name	Hazlitt
Birth date	1778
Death date	1830
Occupation	Critic, essayist, philosopher, translator
Nationality	English

Hazlitt was an English essayist, literary critic, and philosopher active in the late 18th and early 19th centuries whose prose and polemics shaped Romantic-era criticism and political commentary. He engaged contemporaries across literature, journalism, and politics, producing a body of work that connected aesthetic judgment with moral and political sensibility. His writing intersected with figures and institutions of his time, entering discourse alongside poets, novelists, periodicals, and theaters.

Biography

Born in 1778, he emerged during the period that saw the careers of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. His family, education, and early apprenticeship connected him to networks including Unitarianism, the French Revolution, and debates surrounding the Act of Union 1800. He moved in circles that included editors and publishers such as William Hazlitt's contemporaries at leading periodicals, interacting with institutions like the Morning Chronicle, the Edinburgh Review, and the London Stage. His friendships and feuds touched major literary figures: he praised some works of Charles Lamb and criticized others by Sir Walter Scott, while engaging in public disputes that referenced cultural arbiters like John Wilson Croker and Hazlitt's opponents in the press.

During his career he combined roles as a critic, lecturer, and translator, contributing to the diffusion of ideas from continental writers including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Jean-Paul Marat, and Friedrich Schiller. His life intersected with events and movements such as the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of the Industrial Revolution in England, and the expansion of the periodical press centered on London institutions like the British Museum Reading Room and publishing houses found in Fleet Street. He died in 1830, leaving a corpus that subsequent editors and biographers—including those associated with the Victorian era—reappraised and republished.

Major Works

His major publications include essays, collections of criticism, and works of philosophy that addressed contemporaneous literature and public affairs. Among these were collections that reviewed and analyzed the plays of William Shakespeare, the poetry of John Milton, and the novels of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. He also produced a widely circulated set of essays on the theater and dramatic art engaging with productions at institutions like the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and the Covent Garden Theatre.

He translated and introduced continental tragedies and philosophical texts by figures associated with the Sturm und Drang movement and the German classics. His periodical contributions appeared in venues associated with reformist and Whig sympathies, and his essay collections were reprinted and anthologized alongside the works of Thomas De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt's contemporaries in Romantic journalism.

Literary Criticism and Themes

His criticism is marked by energetic prose, aphoristic judgments, and a tendency to fuse aesthetic evaluation with character analysis drawn from writers' biographies and public reputations. He approached the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Homeric translations, and contemporary poets through comparative readings that invoked ancient and modern exemplars such as Aristotle, Plato, Dante Alighieri, and Miguel de Cervantes while situating modern creativity alongside the theatrical culture of 18th-century London and the editorial cultures of Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review.

Recurring themes include the nature of imagination compared with reason as debated by Mary Wollstonecraft and Immanuel Kant; the moral psychology of authors echoing concerns of David Hume and Adam Smith; and the role of satire and sentiment as practiced by Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne. He scrutinized poetic diction, comic and tragic modes, and the public reception of literature, often invoking contemporary institutions such as the Westminster Review and the coffeehouse networks that fueled literary gossip.

Influence and Legacy

His influence extended into Victorian debates about criticism, shaping later assessors like George Eliot's circle and critics writing for periodicals such as the Saturday Review. Later generations of scholars and critics—linked to institutions like Oxford University Press and university departments at Cambridge and Oxford—recovered and re-evaluated his essays, producing annotated editions and biographies. His aphoristic style and insistence on the moral dimension of aesthetic judgment informed the work of later essayists including Walter Pater and commentators in the New Criticism lineage, who referenced Romantic precedents when arguing about close reading and authorial personality.

Culturally, his assessments affected theatrical production, novelistic reception, and the reputation of poets throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. His polemical engagements with figures tied to conservative reviews and government figures reverberated in debates about press freedom and the role of critics in shaping public taste, connecting his legacy to reformist movements and the expanding readership of the periodical press.

Reception and Criticism

Contemporaneous reception ranged from enthusiastic endorsement by reform-minded editors and authors to sharp rebuttal by establishment critics associated with Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review. Major figures—poets, dramatists, and novelists—alternately welcomed his praise or denounced his invective, prompting pamphlet wars and newspaper rejoinders involving editors of the Morning Chronicle and other London journals.

19th- and 20th-century critics reassessed his contribution in light of evolving standards in literary scholarship, with some historians emphasizing his role as a pioneering cultural commentator and others critiquing his partisan tone and occasional ad hominem attacks. Academic studies situated his essays within broader histories of Romanticism and the development of English criticism, debated in university seminars and reflected in bibliographies from major presses and learned societies.

Category:English essayists Category:Romantic critics