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Prose

Notes Hazlitt produced a series of essays on art, drama, literature and politics. During this period he
established himself as England’s leading expert on the writings of William Shakespeare.
Hazlitt wrote several books on literature including Characters of Shakespeare (1817), A View of the
English Stage (1818), English Poets (1818) and English Comic Writers (1819). In these books he urged
the artist to be aware of his social and political responsibilities. Hazlitt continued to write about
politics and his most important books on this subject is Political Essays with Sketches of Public
Characters (1819). In the book Hazlitt explains how the admiration of power turns many writers
into “intellectual pimps and hirelings of the press.”

In 1813 Hazlitt was employed as the parliamentary reporter for the Morning
Chronicle, the country’s leading Whig newspaper. However, in his articles, Hazlitt
criticized all political parties.

Hazlitt’s marriage to Sarah ended in 1823 as a result of an affair with a maid, Sarah Walker.
Hazlitt wrote an account of this relationship in his book Liber Amoris. In 1824 Hazlitt married
Isabella Bridgewater but this relationship only lasted a year.
In the The Spirit of the Age: Contemporary Portraits (1825) Hazlitt provides a series of contemporary
portraits including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, William
Cobbett, William Godwin and William Wilberforce. This was followed by The Plain Speaker (1826)
and Life of Napoleon (4 volumes, 1828-30). William Hazlitt died in poverty of stomach cancer on
18th September 1830.

14.1 Life and Works

Background
The family of Hazlitt’s father were Irish Protestants who moved from the county of Antrim to
Tipperary in the early 18th century. Also named William Hazlitt, Hazlitt’s father attended the
University of Glasgow (where he was taught by Adam Smith), receiving a master’s degree in 1760.
Not entirely content with his Presbyterian faith, he became a Unitarian minister in England. In
1764 he became pastor at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where in 1766 he married Grace Loftus,
daughter of a recently deceased ironmonger. Of their many children, only three survived infancy.
The first of these, John (later known as a portrait painter) was born in 1767 at Marshfield in
Gloucestershire, where the Reverend William Hazlitt had accepted a new pastorate after his
marriage. In 1770, the elder Hazlitt accepted yet another position and moved with his family to
Maidstone, Kent, where his first and only surviving daughter, Margaret (usually known as “Peggy”),
was born that year.

Childhood
House in Wem, Shropshire where the Reverend William Hazlitt and his family lived between 1787
and 1813 William, the youngest of the surviving Hazlitt children, was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone,
in 1778. In 1780, when he was two, his family began a migratory existence that was to last several
years. From Maidstone his father took them to Bandon, County Cork, Ireland; and from Bandon
in 1783 to the United States, where the elder Hazlitt preached, lectured, and founded the First
Unitarian Church at Boston, Massachusetts. In 1786–87 the family returned to England and lived
at Wem, in Shropshire. William would remember little of his years in America, save the taste of
barberries.

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