Hazlitt, William

1778–1830, English essayist. Abandoning the idea of entering the clergy, he took up painting and later journalism. He acted as parliamentary reporter and theatrical critic for the Morning Chronicle and later contributed to Leigh Hunt's Examiner, the Edinburgh Review, the London Magazine, and the New Monthly. Hazlitt's penetrating literary criticism is collected in Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), Lectures on the English Poets (1818), Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), Table Talk (1821–22), and The Spirit of the Age (1825), portraits of his contemporaries. His essays on Shakespeare and his Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820) renewed enthusiasm for Elizabethan drama.

Hazlitt was one of the great masters of the miscellaneous essay, displaying a keen intellect, sensibility, and wide scope of interest and knowledge. His most notable single essays include “On Going a Journey,” “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth,” and “Going to a Fight.” His interest in the French Revolution and his strong beliefs in the principles of liberty and the rights of man inspired him to write a life of Napoleon (4 vol., 1828–30). See his letters (ed. by Herschel M. Sikes et al., 1978).

William Carew Hazlitt, 1834–1913, his grandson, was a bibliographer and wrote The Memoirs of William Hazlitt (1867). Among W. C. Hazlitt's works are a valuable Handbook to the Popular, Poetical, and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain (1867) and its supplements and Four Generations of a Literary Family: The Hazlitts (1897).

See biographies of the elder Hazlitt by H. C. Baker (1962), P. P. Howe (1947, repr. 1972), and S. Jones (1989); studies by J. B. Priestley (1960), R. Park (1971), R. M. Wardle (1971), J. Kinnaird (1978), and D. Bromwich (1985).