Metropolitan Writings

Hazlitt William

William Hazlitt (1778-1830), that most engaging of English prose writers, is provocatively and congenially at home in this new collection of his city essays, each one sparkling with urbane wit and gossip. Characters from the Regency spring to life: Wordsworth and Byron; sportsmen and dandies; street jugglers and footmen and coffee house bores. There is the London Cockney who ventures through Hyde Park "as a cat crosses a gutter" and the lady's maid returning from Italy "as giddy as if she had been up in a balloon".

Gregory Dart reminds us that Hazlitt is not only an important critic and polemicist, but also a wry and reflective observer of human nature, a man who took continual delight in the various pitfalls and paradoxes of metropolitan life. This selection contains many essays that have not previously been available in paperback, together with a short critical introduction and contextual notes.

About the Author

William Hazlitt was born in Maidstone, Kent in 1778, the son of a Unitarian minister. After a short period in America, the family settled in the village of Wem, Shropshire. Hazlitt was educated at the Unitarian college in Hackney from 1793 to 1795, although he decided against the religious life, and began to move in the political and literary circles of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb and Godwin. He wrote philosophy and politics before becoming increasingly involved in literature and journalism. In 1814 he became the "Morning Chronicle" parliamentary reporter and theatre critic, while also writing essays for journals, including the "Edinburgh Review" and "Leigh Hunt's Examiner". His works on literature include the "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays" (1817), dedicated to Lamb and admired by Keats; "Lectures on the English Poets" (1818); "The Round Table", in collaboration with Leigh Hunt (1818); and "Lectures on the English Comic Writers" (1819). His "Political Essays" were also published in 1819, and "Table Talk" in 1821-1922. In 1825 and 1826 much of his best work was collected in two volumes of essays, "The Spirit of the Age" and "The Plain Speaker". In the last ten years of his life hazlitt experienced emotional turmoil and poverty, although he continued to publish until his death in 1830.

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