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Notes France and its consequent heavy taxation. This was followed by a series of articles and
pamphlets on political corruption and the need to reform the voting system.
• Hazlitt began writing for The Times and in 1808 married the editor’s sister, Sarah Stoddart.
His friend, Thomas Barnes, was the newspaper’s parliamentary reporter. Later, Barnes was
to become the editor of the newspaper. In 1810 he published the New and Improved Grammar
of the English Language.
• In 1813 Hazlitt was employed as the parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle.
• Hazlitt was educated at home and at a local school until 1793, when his father sent him to a
Unitarian seminary on what was then the outskirts of London, the Unitarian New College at
Hackney (commonly referred to as Hackney College). Although Hazlitt stayed there for only

about two years, its impact was enormous.

• In April Hazlitt joined Coleridge at his residence in Nether Stowey, where they both spent
time with the poet William Wordsworth. Again, Hazlitt was enraptured. While he was not
immediately struck by Wordsworth’s appearance, when he observed the look in Wordsworth’s
eye as he contemplated a sunset, he reflected, “With what eyes these poets see nature!” On
that occasion given the opportunity to read the Lyrical Ballads in manuscript, Hazlitt saw that
Wordsworth had the mind of a true poet, and he had created something entirely new.
• Hazlitt also visited various picture galleries, and he began to get work doing portraits,
painting somewhat in the style of Rembrandt. And so he managed to make something of a
living for a time, travelling back and forth between London and the country, wherever he
could get work. By 1802, his work was considered good enough that a portrait he had
recently painted of his father was accepted for exhibition by the Royal Academy.
• Hazlitt frequented the society of the Lambs for the next several years. He was not getting
much work as a painter, but now he finally found the opportunity to complete his
philosophical treatise, which was published in 1805 as An Essay on the Principles of Human
Action: Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. This
gained him little notice as an original thinker, and no money. Hazlitt’s outrage at events then
taking place in English politics in reaction to Napoleon’s wars led to his writing and
publishing, at his own expense (though he had almost no money), a political pamphlet, Free
Thoughts on Public Affairs (1806). Finally, he began to find enough work to support himself,
if just barely. Although the treatise he valued above anything else he wrote was never, at
least in his own lifetime, recognised for what he believed was its true worth, it brought him
attention as one who had a grasp of contemporary philosophy. He therefore was commissioned
to abridge and write a preface to a now obscure work of mental philosophy, The Light of
Nature Pursued by Abraham Tucker (originally published in seven volumes from 1765 to
1777), which appeared in 1807 and may have had some influence on his own later thinking.
• In 1808, Hazlitt married Sarah Stoddart, a friend of Mary Lamb and sister of John Stoddart,
a journalist who became editor of The Times newspaper in 1814. Shortly before the wedding,
John Stoddart established a trust into which he began paying £100 per year, for the benefit of
Hazlitt and his wife—this was a very generous gesture, but Hazlitt detested being supported
by his brother-in-law, whose political beliefs he despised.Although incompatibilities would
later drive the couple apart, at first the union seemed to work well enough.
• In October 1812, Hazlitt was hired by The Morning Chronicle as a parliamentary reporter.
• Hazlitt continued to produce articles on miscellaneous topics for The Examiner and other
periodicals, including political diatribes against any whom he felt ignored or minimised the
needs and rights of the common man. Defection from the cause of liberty had become easier
in light of the oppressive political atmosphere in England at that time, in reaction to the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Opposing this tendency, the Hunts were his

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