Hazlitt: A Life: From Winterslow to Frith Street

by Stanley Jones

This long awaited biography, the result of twenty-five years of research, is the most significant portrayal of Hazlitt to appear in almost seventy years. Hazlitt's image has always been filtered through biographies of the major writers and poets with whom he associated, leaving only a partial
picture, and in many cases a distorted one. This insightful biography reveals Hazlitt as a man almost incapacitated by his own diffidence, passionate yet shy in his relationships with women, a warm and generous friend, a doting father, and an incorruptible critic unwilling to observe conventional
social constraints when delivering his opinions. New and relevant details from contemporary newspapers, as well as from letters and personal documents, flesh out many shadowy figures in Hazlitt's life, particularly his great love, Sarah Walker, and Isabella Bridgewater, his second wife.

414 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Tom van Veenendaal · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent work of scholarship that Hazlitt expert Uttara Natarajan called "the most substantial and important biography" of Hazlitt. Jones makes the great choice of starting the biography when Hazlitt's writing career really got started, thereby skipping the early parts of biography that always bore me, endless descriptions of family lineages, parents, upbringing. The result is an academic but surprisingly breezy, eminently readable biography of the great essayist.

Especially fun are the portraits of contemporaries. The periodical press was serious business at the time, and many writers partook in practices that would later be called 'slinging ink'; really, even that might be far too light a description for what are really attempts at murder with words. Hazlitt was haunted by two lackeys of Blackwood's Magazine, especially when he insulted academics with his wonderful (and entirely correct) essay 'On the Ignorance of the Learned', and was amply rewarded with this hilarious """"review""" of his first essay collection, which they say should have been called

'The Dunghill', or something still more characteristically vile; for such an offensive heap of pestilential jargon has seldom come our way ... raked together from the common sewer of a weekly paper called the Examiner, and they who after that information can have any relish for the feculent garbage of blasphemy and scurrility, may sit down at the Round Table, and enjoy the same meal with the same appetite as the negroes in the West Indies eat dirt and filth.

I'm sorry -- what? In fact, Blackwood sent literal spies to London from Scotland to befriend Hazlitt and gather information. Further intrigue is added by John Scott, Hazlitt's beloved publisher in The London Magazine, dying in a pistol duel (!). Or have a look at these lovely descriptions of John Wilson Croaker:

Croker’s Quarterly notice of Keat’s Endymion is notorious, but it was merely an early example of a venom which showed no abatement in thirty years of reviewing, so that we find Carlyle in 1851 reading in the Quarterly some ‘very beggarly Crokerism, all of copperas and gall and human baseness ... No viler mortal calls himself man than old Croker this time.’ Lady Charleville was more urbane: ‘He deserves all the reprobation of candid, honourable men.’ But others felt compelled to resort to hyperbole: ‘He had the dagger and the poison ever ready for friend or foe’, and, ‘He was an adventurer whose path from obscurity to greatness was paved with dead men’s skulls.’ The daughter of an old friend declared that ‘[his] chief pleasure in life [was] to cause mental suffering to his fellows’, and Macaulay said that he ‘would go a hundred miles through sleet and snow, on the top of a coach, in a December night, to search a parish register for the sake of showing that a man is illegitimate, or a woman older than she says she is.’

Phew! It's a miracle our sensitive genius Hazlitt survived as long as he did. This biography of him remains important and readable, and by focusing only on the later life contains more information of that period than others. Highly recommended, although some later biographies (like Grayling's or Wu's) are, granted, easier reads and better starting points for the layman.

[Julian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Far too scholarly & analytical for me. I gave up half way through this lengthy biography. No doubt the author did his research, 25 years worth I'm led to believe but I found it hard going.