The Spirit of the Age Contemporary Portraits

by William Hazlitt

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Genres: Essays, Biography, Nonfiction, Romanticism, Classics, History, British Literature

228 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1825

About the author

William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was an English writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, and as a grammarian and philosopher. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell, but his work is currently little-read and mostly out of print. During his lifetime, he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

Hazlitt was the son of the Unitarian minister and writer, William Hazlitt, who greatly influenced his work. Hazlitt's son, also called William Hazlitt, and grandson, William Carew Hazlitt, were also writers.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name on Goodreads.

Reviews

[Tom van Veenendaal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stevenson put it well when he wrote "We are mighty fine fellows today, but we cannot write like William Hazlitt." Or, as Arthur Krystal wrote, "You quote lines from Johnson; you want to recite entire passages from Hazlitt." There are passages in The Spirit of the Age that have never been rivaled in the history of English literature. His prose is so good it is hard to read this book -- you cannot help but pause and reread, and treat every passage like a sacred treasure to be reflected upon at length.

This and The Plain Speaker are Hazlitt's masterpieces. The latter has more "plain" prose, as the title indicates. Get the William Wordsworth Trust edition, which is beautifully edited and designed. It is also the only edition currently in print.

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hazlitt's writings prove himself to be the great Romantic essayist, and an embodiment of the writerly 'spirit of the age', to be positioned alongside alongside every poet covered in his critical portraiture. His prose is dense with the tossing waves of literary allusion and the rhythms of 'the language really used by men', standing poetical and conversational, always minutely conscious of its own language, and oftentimes a seeming forefather of the journalistic prose of our modern age's 'spirit'. The most pleasurable sections are his discussions of Wordsworth's revolutionary poetry, detailing how 'as the lark ascends from its low bed on fluttering wing, so Mr. Wordsworth’s unpretending Muse in russet disguise scales the summits of reflection', although his grand and praiseful descriptions are equalled in his more hateful approach to various other, explicitly named, poets.

[Joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant portraits of some of the great minds of Hazlitt's age. He does not mince words. Enemies are savaged, friends are praised. Some of these essays show Hazlitt's difficulty in coming to grips with those he once admired but had since turned from those virtues for which he had sympathy.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The eloquence of Hazlitt's writing is extraordinary.
Whilst our memory of some of those critiqued has faded to virtual obscurity in the past 200 years, nothing detracts from the beauty of the author's use of language, breadth of vocabulary, knowledge and wit; nothing compares.

[Surreysmum · Rating 2 out of 5]

[These notes were made in 1983:]. From this book, which took me some weeks to get through, I learned chiefly that Mr. Hazlitt was a Whig, at a time when Whigs were well out of power, and that he had an extremely vituperative pen for all his political opponents. His chief complaint is of something called "Legitimacy," which I take to be some sort of secularized version of the Divine Right of Kings. His observations on contemporary literary figures are also strongly tinctured by his political sentiments. His admiration for Scott's novels, f'r'instance, is in obvious conflict with his horror of Scott's conservatism, and Wordsworth comes under attack for his swing to the right (Southey not so much, strangely enough - it seems he was a personal friend). But behind all that, there is enough acute criticism and interesting personal observation to make these essays worth reading. It's unfortunate that the impression of their author we're left with is such an unpleasant one, tho'! (I do rather admire the way he refuses to go back and change his harshnesses on Byron simply because he hears of Byron's death).

[Lucy · Rating 1 out of 5]

'Little-read nowadays', says the Goodreads guru, and I can see why. I like dense prose but this defeated me. When I could see round the circumlocutions, the content was disappointingly trivial. Maybe we are just too far removed from the age to appreciate what were contemporary judgements on the famous people of the day - his essay on Byron was amended on Byron's death - and of course we have the advantage of knowing whose reputation lived on. But there's no excuse for dull, turgid writing.

[David Buhler · Rating 2 out of 5]

I finished half of this book. Hazlitt writes of his contemporanious authors with both praise and blame - mostly blame. I would have liked to learn more about his subjects and less of his opinions about them. The style of writing is wordy: one metaphor or simile will not suffice, no he can easily invent a dozen or more to string out one after another. I'm happy to return to todays authors!

[Avis Black · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hazlitt will write a sentence, and in his next sentence will simply rephrase the first sentence. His excessive wordiness drives me crazy.