Welcome to my Hazlitt pages!
 |
 |
| If
mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long
ago. The theory is plain enough; but they are prone to mischief,
"to every good work reprobate."
William
Hazlitt |
Man is a toad-eating animal. The
admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of
it in himself: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.
William
Hazlitt. |
William Hazlitt
1778-1830
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philosophy: Philosophy.
William Hazlitt was English
(from Irish decent) and lived
from 1778-1830. He is best known as an essayist. He was a highly
original and individual man, with original ideas on philosophy and a
beautiful style.
He is not by far as well-known as he
deserves to be, probably because he failed to please and felt pleased
to hate too many and too much (according to those with lesser talents
and less courage). This was mostly due to his honesty,
courage, and brightness of intellect, and the obvious all-too-human
failings of his fellows.
The Wikipedia article, in the
following link, last seen on March 9, 2011 by me, is good and useful:
At present, there are the eleven of
his essays on my site in the left pane, and the beginning of Hazlitt's
"Political Essays",
in my html-edition. These are not annotated at all or not annotated
fully by me, but I plan to add many more, with my annotations, simply
because Hazlitt had a very fine mind and a very beautiful style.
(Proviso: I do have ME, which makes
things much more difficult for me than it would be otherwise.)
There are some good editions of
Hazlitt, but I do not know whether these are in print
- Selected Essays of William
Hazlitt
Edited by Geoffry Keynes
First ed. 1930 - London The Nonesuch Press
- Table Talk
The Plain Speaker
Lectures on the English Poets and Spirit of the Age
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays
All in Everyman's Library
- William Hazlitt - Selected
Writings
Edited by Ronald Blythe
Penguin Books
Each and all of these give a fine
selection of Hazlitt's essays. The first is the longest and the best
introduction to Hazlitt, but probably only available in antiquarian
bookshops.
There also are two internet-places
with useful editions of Hazlitt
The first of these has most of what
is also in Everyman's Library, apparently based on that as well, which
is good, because the editions in Everyman's Library I have are very
well done.
The second has quite a lot more, but you must jump through some hoops
mostly surrected by Google, and the editions are far from perfect: The
Google scan into pdf of Hazlitt's "Political Essays", for example,
misses at least the first page, and possibly one more, of the the list
of contents; it has a sanctimonous and hypocritical intro by Google on
Google's excellencies, which - as far as I can see - are less about
helping people as about helping Google, namely to a claim on all books
they scanned "for the public"; and the txt-version that's also
supplied cannot be independently used because it chockful of mistakes.
There are several biographies by him
of which P.P. Howe's, who also edited his collected works, is probably
still the best. This also was published by Penguin and also probably
is only available in antiquarian bookshops.
There also is a Hazlitt society
but what I saw of the site is that it
is not extensive, not well done, and probably of use only to those who
are cognoscenti of Hazlitt anyway - which is not to say that the
Hazlitt Society doesn't do good work, but only that I, who am Dutch
rather than English, know little about them, and believe so excellent
an author deserves a much more extensive and better designed site.
As to my illustrations:
Hazlitt's likeness is originally drawn by Bewick, in 1824, and the
left picture is the mirror-image of the right, which is one I tweaked
in 2011 from a discoloured one on the internet, with the help of some
imaging software. It shows Hazlitt at around 46 years of age. There is
one very much like it, probably also produced with some trickery, in
Blythe's edition mentioned above. (The trickery I used: Convert to
blue and then save in black/grey tones.)
More about Hazlitt in books:
It seems that, if you are persistent enough, you can presently get
most of the texts that were in P.P. Howe's edition of the Collected
Works of Hazlitt. There also are some of his works, or selections from
them, in print, but it would be very helpful if the full text of
Hazlitt's writings were put on line in good html editions, because (1)
he is one of the greatest writers in English, bar none and (2) such
editions as exist, namely the Howe edition and a more recent on by
Duncan Wu, are both forbiddingly expensive, and probably only bought
by Hazlitt-specialist with secured academic tenure, or by university
libraries, that still have money to spend on books or science rather
than on managers.
I have read all of and about Hazlitt
I could lay my hands on, since I discovered him in 1983, browsing in
an antiquarian bookshop, and should say one's chances of getting
something worthwile by or about Hazlitt have improved a lot with the
internet, though he is most unlikely to become a popular author, at
least until the average human intelligence has been raised
considerably.
And while I have read rather widely
in and around Hazlitt, I have not read widely in the more recent
literary criticism of him, firstly because it is all quite expensive,
and secondly because I generally don't like literary criticism, except
by a choice few, such as Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, Orwell and I.A.
Richards.
Anyway... here are four books about
Hazlitt that I did find interesting and worthwile. I start with two
biographies:
- P.P. Howe: The Life of William
Hazlitt - Penguin Books 1949 (original 1922)
- Stanley Jones: Hazlitt, A Life:
From Winterslow to Frith Street - Oxford UP, 1989
These are both good, and Mr. Jones
managed to find out many things about Hazlitt that others didn't. I do
not know whether either is currently in print or available.
- Paulin, Tom. The Day-Star of
Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style - Faber and Faber, 1998
Mr. Paulin, indeed like Mr. Jones, is
a literary scientist, and while I did not like all that Mr. Paulin
wrote - that I incidentally read in a pre-publication form I found in
an antiquarian bookshop in Amsterdam, which I mention because I may
not have read the polished version that was eventually published by
Faber and Faber - he did write an interesting and worthwile book.
- James Engell, The Creative
Imagination - Englihtenment to Romanticism, Harvard UP, 1981
This is a book about the subject of
its title, in which Hazlitt has a good chapter. The book is also
generally quite interesting. The version I mentioned is the original
hardcover one; a paperback version was published in 1999.