Metropolitan Writings

by William Hazlitt, Gregory Dart (Editor)

Provocatively and congenially at home in this new collection of his city essays, the engaging late-18th-century and early-19th-century English prose writer William Hazlitt sparkles with urban wit and gossip. Characters from the Regency spring to life in these essays, including William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, sportsmen and dandies, street jugglers and footmen, and coffee house bores.

Genres: Essays

220 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2005

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.

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