William Hazlitt
A humorous phrase was not the highest ambition of the lifelong radical William
Hazlitt(1778–1830).His literary and theatrical criticism consists of random lively
‘impressions’. He wrote one wonderful essay,My First Acquaintance with Poets
(1823), an unforgettable account of his meeting with his heroes of twenty-five
years earlier. Wordsworth ‘sat down and talked very naturally and freely, with a
mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a
stro ng tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine. He instantly began to
make havoc of the half of a Cheshire cheese on the table ....’ STC’s ‘forehead was
broad and high,light as ifbuilt of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his
ey es rolling beneath them, like a sea with darkened lustre .... His mouth was gross,
voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured and round: but his nose, the
rudder of the face,the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing – like what he
has done.’
Vigorous caricature made Hazlitt an effective journalist and public speaker, but
his politics overrode his critical judgement. The premium which Romanticism gave
to sincerity leaves a criticism which is merely autobiographical at the mercy of whim
and prejudice. Lamb, for example, so ‘gentle’, so fond of old books, old China and his
old schoolfriend Coleridge, had a cheerful contempt for the music of Mozart and
Handel. Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) was a benign exponent of descriptive-cum-appre-
ciative criticism, a man of letters of liberal energy and sympathy. He should also be
remembered less for his own writing than as the editor who published Keats, Shelley,
Byron, Hazlitt, Hogg and Tennyson. Rightly or wrongly, however, he will also be
remembered as the supposed original of Skimpole, the immortal sponger in
Dickens’s Bleak House.Thomas De Quincey
Thomas De Quincey(1785–1859) is best remembered for the elaborate prose of
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, an autobiography full of hallucinatory
dreams,notably one of an Easter Sunday when he recognizes the face of Ann, a 17-
year-old prostitute who had helped him when he was down and out in London. The
psychological configuration given by De Quincey to his compelling memories is
reminiscent of those in Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight and in Wordsworth’s ‘spots of
time’.It prefigures the imaginative use of the Gothic made by the Brontës.246 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837
Men of letters
Charles Lamb(1775–1834) Specimens of
the English Dramatic Poets who Lived about
the Time of Shakespeare(1818), Essays of
Elia(1823)
William Hazlitt(1778–1830) Characters of
Shakespeare’s Plays(1817), English Comic
Writers(1819), The Spirit of the Age(1825)
Walter Savage Landor(1775–1864)
Imaginary Conversations(1824–9)Leigh Hunt(1784–1859) (ed.) The
Examinerand others
Thomas Love Peacock(1785–1866)
Headlong Hall(1816), Melincourt(1817),
Nightmare Abbey(1818), Crochet Castle
(1831), Gryll Grange(1861)
Thomas De Quincey(1795–1859)
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
(1821)