William Hazlitt Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt is best known to modern readers as the author of essays such as "On Going a Journey" and "Indian Jugglers." The face he presented to his contemporaries was not always as accommodating as that of the speaker in the familiar essays, however. By his own admission "a good hater," Hazlitt was a frequent and formidable advocate for the reform position in the political and literary engagements of Regency England, contributing to the day's leading liberal publications, the Examiner and the Edinburgh Review among them, and being vilified in turn by leading conservative journals, including the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine. But Hazlitt the radical polemicist should not be viewed as wholly distinct from Hazlitt the familiar essayist. His best writing incorporates both perspectives, the polemicist's angry indictments of corruption and the essayist's self-conscious musings on infirmities of character, individual and national. Though as prone to one-noted harangues as reformers such as William Cobbett, Hazlitt was also capable of reflecting on the complex nature of political discourse itself-in parliamentary rhetoric, periodical literature, and newly emerging emanations of popular consciousness, or "public opinion." With a shrewd sense of the conventions defining political culture, Hazlitt's writings undertake a genuine critique of the age's ideological self-representations.

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