Volume 38, Number 7 · April 11, 1991
Master of Regret
By David Bromwich
Hazlitt: A Life, From Winterslow to Frith Street
by Stanley Jones
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 397 pp., $59.00
Stanley Jones's biography takes up the story of William Hazlitt's life in 1808. There is a bad, but plausible, excuse for this. It allows Mr. Jones to begin with his hero at the age of thirty and about to be married. There is also a good, if opportunistic, excuse. Hazlitt in 1808 was poised on the brink of the greatest of journalistic careers. In the preceding decade, he had begun to publish occasional essays on politics and morality. In the decade to come, he would move from being a parliamentary reporter to working as a dramatic critic, art critic, literary critic, radical polemicist, lecturer on philosophy and literature, and finally the author of more than a hundred personal essays. The last was a form he both invented and brought to perfection. On miscellaneous topics from 'The Fight' (a report of a boxing match) to 'Why the Heroes of Romances are Insipid' (an inquiry into the weaker characters of Richardson, Fielding, Scott, and Fanny Burney), between 1808 and his death in 1830 he wrote some of the best prose in English. But Hazlitt's career has an interesting background, too—both in itself and as an example of the strivings of his intellectual generation. It is unfortunate that Mr. Jones should have omitted the first half of the story.
Review, 6654 words
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