William Hazlitt

In 1808, Hazlitt married Sarah Stoddart, a friend of Mary Lamb and sister of John Stoddart, a journalist and the editor of ‘The Times’ newspaper.

The couple had three sons but only one of their children, William, born in 1811, survived infancy.

On 17 July 1822, the couple got divorced owing to Hazlitt’s brief extra-marital affair with Sarah Walker, a girl who was 22 years his junior.

William Hazlitt was born on 10 April 1778 in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, England to William Hazlitt Sr., a Unitarian minister in England and Grace Loftus.

The family shifted to Wem in Shropshire when Hazlitt was two.

He was educated mainly at home and at a local school.

At 13 he debuted in writing with a letter, which was published in the ‘Shrewsbury Chronicle’.

In 1793 he was sent to the New College at Hackney, a Unitarian Seminary.

He moved to London in 1804 in order to shape up his writing career.

On 19 July 1805, he published ‘An Essay on the Principles of Human Action’ with the help of William Godwin.

In 1807 Hazlitt’s preface to ‘The Light of Nature Pursued’ along with a compilation of parliamentary speeches:’The Eloquence of the British Senate’ were published.

In January 1812 Hazlitt began his career as a lecturer by delivering a series of talks on the British philosophers at the Russell Institution in London.

In October 1812, he was hired by ‘The Morning Chronicle’, the Whig newspaper as a parliamentary reporter.

The ‘Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays’ (1817) is the representative of Hazlitt’s literary criticism. The book contains subjective commentary on famous Shakespearean protagonists like Macbeth and Hamlet, and introduces his concept of ‘gusto’. ‘Table-Talk’ (1821–22) and ‘The Round Table’ (1817) are his two finest collections of essays, even though they received a lot of negative reviews at the time.